BX  8495  .W5  L5  1905 
Little,  Arthur  W.  1856-1910. 
The  times  and  the  teaching 
of  John  Wesley 


Digitized  by 

the  Internet  Archive 

in  2014 

https://archive.org/details/timesteachingofjOOIitt 


THE  TIMES  AND  THE  TEACHING 
OF  JOHN  WESLEY. 


JOHN  WESLEY 


THE  TIMES  AND  THE 


TEACHING  OF 

JOHN  WESLEY 


ARTHUR  W.  LITTLE,  D.D.,  L.H.D., 

Rector  of  St.  Mark's,  Evanston.  III., 
Author  of  "Reasons  for  Being  a  Churchman." 


"John  Wesley  stands  on  high  in  holy  jame, 
And  sacred  memories  cluster  'round  his  name.  " 


SECOND  EDITION. 


THE  YOUNG  CHURCHMAN  CO., 

MILWAUKEE,  WIS. 
1905 


Copyright,  1897  and  1905 
By  Arthur  W.  Little. 


TO  THE 

RT.  REV.  FATHER  IN  GOD 
EDWARD  FAWCETT 

BISHOP  OF  QOTNCY 
THIS  LITTLE  BOOK  IS  DEDICATED  BY  ONE  WHO  HAS 
WATCHED  HIS  CONSCIENTIOUS  AND 
HONORABLE  RETURN 

FROM  WESLEYANISN  TO  WESLEY 


CONTEXTS. 


Preface  ix. 

CHAPTER  I. 

The  Church  and  the  Age  1 

CHAPTER  II. 
The  Student  and  the  Missionary  16 

CHAPTER  III. 
Life  Work  26 

CHAPTER  IV. 
Doctrinal  Position  32 

CHAPTER  V. 

Allegiance  to  the  Church  42 

CHAPTER  VI. 
The  So-called  Ordinations  47 

CHAPTER  VII. 
The  Peaceful  End  in  the  Communion  of  the 

Catholic  Church  60 

Index  65 


PKEFACE. 


There  are  two  John  Wesleys — just  as  there  are 
two  Saint  Peters — the  Wesley  of  history  and  the 
Wesley  of  popular  tradition.  It  is  my  purpose  to 
supplement  and  thus  to  correct  this  imperfect  pop- 
ular impression  by  calling  attention  to  certain 
suppressed  or  forgotten  facts  in  the  character,  the 
faith,  the  work  of  that  great  and  holy  man.* 

I  shall  first  give  a  picture  of  the  sad  religious 
state  of  England  under  the  Georges.  Next,  I  shall 
sketch  briefly  the  life  of  the  Founder  of  Methodism 
— a  life  noble,  consecrated,  abounding  in  self-sacri- 

•  This  has  been  done  before.  See,  e.g.,  Wesley  in  Com- 
pany with  High  Churchmen,  by  H.  W.  Holden ;  The  Church- 
man's Life  of  Wesley,  by  R.  Denny  Urlln  ;  Wesley  and  Mod- 
ern Methodism,  by  Canon  Hockin  ;  John  Wesley,  by  J.  H. 
Overton ;  The  Church  and  Wesleyanism,  by  P.  G.  Medd ; 
John  Wesley's  Churchmanship  and  Who  Are  Wesley's  Heirs  f 
by  Dean  Luckock  ;  John  Wesley  Being  Dead,  Yet  Speaketh, 
by  Joseph  Hammond ;  A  Methodist  in  Search  of  the  Church, 
by  S.  T.  M'Masters,  etc.,  etc.  The  earlier  Methodist  biog- 
raphers of  Wesley,  such  as  Whitehead,  Coke,  and  Moore, 
and  measurably  Tyerman  In  our  day,  did  not  Ignore  the 
facts  which  It  is  the  purpose  of  this  little  book  to  set  forth. 


X. 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


fice  and  beneficent  activity.  This  I  shall  do  in 
order  to  make  a  background  on  which  to  show  the 
teaching  of  Wesley,  the  basic  principles  of  his 
belief,  the  object  of  his  "Societies,"  and  his  living 
and  dying  injunctions  to  his  followers. 

I  do  not  claim  that  Wesley  was  always  consist- 
ent. As  a  priest  of  the  Church  be  sometimes  did 
things  which  had  an  unchurcbly  look  and  a  non- 
conformist tendency,  of  which  he  seemed  wholly  un- 
conscious. Tbese  things,  however,  concerned  minor 
matters  of  discipline,  jurisdiction,  tenure  of  prop- 
erty, and  methods  of  work  in  a  dark  and  lawless 
age;  or  else  they  were  mistakes  of  judgment  under 
the  bewildering  pressure  of  unprecedented  condi- 
tions and  of  evils  which  cried  to  heaven. 

The  great  central  sweep  of  his  life-current  was 
intelligently,  sincerely,  loyally  Anglo-Catholic.  This, 
I  venture  to  think,  will  be  found  to  be  not  only 
asserted,  but  proved,  in  this  little  book. 

It  is  necessary  to  bear  in  mind  that  Wesley's  aim 
•,  was  avowedly  to  supplement,  not  to  supplant,  the 
Cburch.  In  all  his  utterances  Wesley  assumes 
that  his  followers  attend  the  parish  church  every 
Sunday  and  receive  the  ministrations  of  tbe  parish 
priest.  As  the  Cburch  was  at  that  time  deficient 
in  zeal,  evangelistic  spirit,  Christian  brotherhood, 
and  subjective  religion,  Wesley  gave  his  chief  efforts 
to  such  things  in  order  to  remedy  a  temporary 
defect  and  to  provoke  the  whole  body  of  the  clergy 
to  do  the  same. 

But  these  things,  so  conspicuous  in  Methodism, 


PEEFACE. 


should,  as  Wesley  designed,  rest  on  the  bed-rock  of 
sound  Churchmanship.  Alone  and  without  the  sac- 
ramental grace,  the  authority,  the  steady  order  and 
control  of  the  Church,  they  do  not  constitute  a 
rounded,  well  balanced,  stable  system.  The  best, 
the  most  successful  period  of  Methodism  was  while 
it  was  an  integral  portion  of  the  Church,  the  Meth- 
odist "Connection."  Had  it  remained  so,  the  cause 
of  Christ  would  have  been  advanced  beyond  our 
fondest  hopes. 

That  for  which  Wesley  most  longed  and  prayed 
and  wrought,  viz.,  the  awakening  of  the  Church  to 
the  work  of  saving  souls,  is  now  an  accomplished 
fact.  Wesley  in  the  dark  century  dreamed  of  such 
a  revival,  and  began  it.  The  Oxford  Movement 
has  made  it  a  reality.  The  dominant  spirit  of  the 
Anglo-Catholic  Communion  to-day  is  Wesleyan  in 
the  truest  sense  of  that  word.  The  Church  is  now 
in  practice,  and  not  only  in  theory,  a  Church  after 
Wesley's  own  heart,  and  that  to  a  degree  which  no 
other  religious  body  has  attained. 

That  which  Wesley  most  dreaded  and  deprecated 
and  denounced  is  also  an  accomplished  fact,  viz., 
the  separation  of  the  bulk  of  his  followers  from  the 
Church  he  loved,  carrying  with  them  a  part,  but 
only  a  part,  of  his  faith  and  of  his  love. 

As  rector,  for  many  years,  of  the  parish  which, 
I  apprehend,  contains  the  strongest  stronghold  of 
Methodism  in  the  world,  and  is  the  seat  of  the 
Northwestern  University,  I  have  seen  much  of  all 
that  is  best  in  the  Methodist  religion.    I  have  many 


xii. 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


dear  friends  in  that  communion.  I  have  never 
spoken  a  harsh  or  uncharitable  word  of  one  of  them 
(or  of  anyone  who  loves  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ  in 
sincerity  and  truth).  I  differ  from  them  only 
wherein  they,  as  Methodists,  differ  from  their 
Founder,  and  wherein  I,  as  a  Churchman,  agree 
with  him. 

I  offer  this  little  book  to  Churchmen  and  to 
Methodists  alike.  I  am  not  concerned  that  any 
others  should  see  it.  It  is  a  "family  letter."  I 
wish  that  every  Churchman  and  every  Methodist 
would  read  it,  and  that,  too,  in  the  kindly  spirit 
in  which,  God  knows,  it  is  meant. 

To  my  brother  Churchmen  I  offer  it  in  memory 
of  one  of  our  own  greatest  heroes,  "a  prince  and  a 
mighty  man  in  Israel."  This  I  do  with  the  hope  of 
leading  them  to  a  higher  appreciation  of  John  Wes- 
ley and  a  better  understanding  of  the  status  of  our 
Methodist  cousins — for  near  of  kin  we  account  them 
still. 

To  my  Methodist  cousins  I  offer  this  little  book 
with  the  honest  hope  and  the  earnest  prayer  that  it 
may  lead  them  to  a  juster  estimate  of  their  Founder 
and  a  more  faithful  following  of  his  teaching  and 
of  his  example. 

If  some  of  them,  as  they  read  his  forgotten 
words,  should  feel  like  Josiah,  when  Shaphan  the 
scribe  brought  him  the  long  lost  Book  of  the  Law 
(II.  Chron.  xxxiv.  18-21),  it  would  not  be  strange. 
And  if  so  be  that,  by  the  mercy  of  God,  here  and 
there  one  or  another  should  be  led  to  look  toward  the 


PREFACE. 


xiii. 


old  Mother  Church  and  to  come  home,  I,  as  an 
honest  Churchman,  would  thank  God.  There  is  a 
light  in  the  Church's  window  and  a  loving  welcome 
within.  "Antiquam  exquirite  matrem."  But  even 
though  this  may  not  happen  in  a  single  case,  I  shall 
still  thank  God,  if  my  honest  effort  will  only  give 
my  Methodist  friends  a  little  more  of  kindly  regard 
for  the  old  Catholic  and  Apostolic  Church  which 
Wesley  loved,  and  which  is  far  more  lovable  now 
than  it  was  in  his  day. 

If,  after  manfully  facing  the  same  premises,  we 
Churchmen  and  Methodists  draw  different  con- 
clusions, then  let  us  regretfully  go  our  several  ways, 
though  without  agreement,  yet  not  without  love.  I 
judge  no  man,  but  it  was  Wesley  himself  who  said: 
"I  do  and  must  blame  every  one  of  them  for  sep- 
arating.   Afterwards  I  leave  them  to  God." 

I  would  only  add  that  I  wish  all  Methodists 
might  have  the  kindly  feeling  toward  the  old  Mother 
Church,  which  I  find  that  many  of  them  still  cher- 
ish in  their  heart  of  hearts,  and  which  "certain  also 
of  their  own  poets"  have  so  well  expressed,  as  for 
example  in  the  following  lines:  * 

The  Church  of  England,  venerable  name, 

How  rich  thy  legacy  of  holy  fame  I 

Scarce  had  the  Lord  ascended  from  the  earth 

When  Apostolic  zeal  gave  thee  thy  birth. 

The  trunk  that  bore  John  Wesley  as  Its  shoot 

Had  plainly  not  yet  withered  to  the  root. 

Her  children  from  this  ancient  mother  sprung 

Will  not  upbraid  her  with  a  heedless  tongue. 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


From  her  we  have  our  richest  heritage, 

Our  history  has  with  hers  a  common  page. 

Reformed,  not  revolutionized,  thou  hast 

Ne'er  broken  with  the  great  historic  past; 

Freed  from  the  yoke,  purged  from  the  papal  stain, 

Thy  ancient  monuments  and  forms  remain. 

Thine  are  those  mighty  shrines  of  prayer  and  praise 

Which  bow  the  soul  and  then  to  heaven  upraise. 

Thy  noble  ritual  is  sure  defense 

'Gainst  weak  caprice  or  crude  Irreverence ; 

Thine  Is  the  glorious  anthem  and  the  choir 

Of  seraph  voices  that  in  song  aspire ; 

Thine  are  the  sacred  liturgies  more  sweet 

As  generations  the  same  prayers  repeat, 

More  deeply  hallowed  as  from  sire  to  son 

The  holy  Immemorial  words  pass  on, 

With  ever  richer  fragrance  round  them  shed 

By  filial  reverence  for  the  sainted  dead, 

Binding  the  earlier  and  the  later  days 

In  one  continual  chain  of  prayer  and  praise. 

Go  on,  great  Church,  still  make  thy  faith  to  shine, 

And  with  thy  might  help  on  the  work  divine: 

Still,  fervor  with  propriety  unite,  ■ 

And  pour  on  truth  thy  learning's  steady  light; 

Still  onward  press  to  nobler,  holier  deed, 

In  all  of  good  be  God  thy  help  and  speed. t 


t  "Methodism,"  pp.  15-16,  23-4-5. 


CHAPTEE  I. 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  AGE. 

CHE  eighteenth  century  is  the  polar  night  of 
Anglican  history.  From  the  unification 
and  final  establishment  of  the  Church  under  St. 
Theodore,  before  England  was  a  nation,  until 
the  present  day,  there  has  been  no  one  century 
during  which  the  outlook  for  Catholic  truth 
and  Christian  living  was  so  hopeless,  as  the  hun- 
dred years  which  followed  the  death  of  Queen 
Anne.  Our  Church  had  sunk  very  low  in  the 
thirteenth  century;  but  the  two  great  orders  of 
preaching  friars — mendicant  Methodists  of  that 
age — quickened  and  purified  her.  They  in 
turn  fell  from  their  first  excellence  and  became 
a  curse,  as  do  all  extraordinary  agencies  super- 
added to  the  regular  and  permanent  system  of 


2 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


the  Church,  when  they  have  accomplished  their 
temporary  mission. 

The  English  Church,  however,  got  rid  of 
the  degenerate  followers  of  St.  Francis  and  St. 
Dominic;  in  due  time  freed  herself  from  the 
long  usurpation  of  the  Roman  Pontiffs;  sur- 
vived the  fever  and  delirium  of  the  Reforma- 
tion, and  came  out  of  it  all  the  same  old  Cath- 
olic and  Apostolic  Church.  Like  a  fair  woman 
after  a  siege  of  typhoid,  she  found  herself  thin, 
pale,  shorn  of  her  golden  locks,  impoverished 
with  doctors'  bills,  but  the  same  "elect  lady," 
only  purer  in  blood  and  brighter  in  mind. 

Next,  we  see  the  Church  surviving  the  hor- 
rors of  the  Puritan  rebellion.  In  the  Restora- 
tion settlement  of  1662,  purified  by  fire,  she  re- 
asserted her  Catholicity  and  claimed  her  doc- 
trinal, devotional,  and  organic  continuity  more 
strenuously  than  before.  Charles  II.  contin- 
ued, in  the  main,  the  ecclesiastical  policy  of  his 
martyred  father.  Bad  as  he  was,  he  neverthe- 
less gathered  about  him  a  noble  bench  of  Bish- 
ops, the  "Caroline  divines,"  of  whom,  with  their 
presbyters,  it  used  to  be  said,  clerus  Anglicanus, 
stupor  mundi! — the  Anglican  clergy,  the  won- 
der of  the  world ! 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  AGE.  3 

The  accession,  in  1688,  of  William  of 
Orange,  a  Protestant  and  a  foreigner,  rendered 
necessary  by  the  perversion  and  the  tyranny  of 
James  II.,  was  a  dreadful  blow  to  the  Catholic 
cause  in  Great  Britain.  On  political  grounds 
William  deprived  of  their  sees  and  livings  six 
of  the  best  Bishops  in  England,  with  four  hun- 
dred priests,  and  all  the  Bishops  and  priests  of 
Scotland,  establishing  the  Calvinistic  heresy 
in  the  northern  kingdom,  and  attempting 
(though  in  vain)  to  incorporate  all  forms  of 
Protestant  Christianity  into  the  Catholic 
Church  of  England. 

The  sees  were  soon  filled,  for  the  most  part, 
with  latitudinarian  Bishops,  mere  tools  of  the 
Dutch  king.  But,  by  the  mercy  of  God,  the 
priesthood  stood  firm.  Neither  William  nor 
his  complacent  prelates  could  frighten  or  coax 
the  Lower  House  of  Convocation  to  surrender 
their  Catholic  birthright,  or  even  to  allow  the 
word  "Protestant"  to  be  indirectly  associated 
with  the  Anglican  Church. 

The  eighteenth  century  came  in  with  a 
gleam  of  light.  Queen  Anne  was  a  true  friend 
to  the  Church.  Convocation  was  allowed  to 
resume  its  sittings.    Great  efforts  were  made  to 


4 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


conserve  the  Faith,  elevate  morals,  and  encour- 
age learning;  to  repair  and  build  churches,  to 
relieve  the  grinding  poverty  of  the  lower  clergy, 
and  even  to  propagate  religion  in  distant  lands. 

When  the  Queen  died,  in  1714,  the  Church 
of  England  was  stronger  in  the  affection  of  the 
masses  than  ever  before  for  a  thousand  years. 
It  was,  however,  the  glory  of  sunset.  The 
night — that  polar  night — was  at  hand. 

Many  who  know  only  the  awakened  Church 
of  to-day,  will  hardly  credit  me  if  I  draw  a 
picture  of  the  Church  under  the  Georges.  A 
majority  of  the  Bishops  were  Whig  politicians 
promoted  for  political  services.  Most  of  them 
were  gentlemen  of  scholarly  tastes  and  respect- 
able morals,  living  comfortably  in  their  palaces 
or  in  London,  courtiers,  Erastians,  Low  Church- 
men. Some  of  them  never  visited  their  Dio- 
ceses. Confirmation  was  sadly  neglected;  dis- 
cipline, there  was  little ;  energy  and  enthusiasm, 
none  at  all. 

The  voice  of  the  Church  was  hushed.  Con- 
vocation was  not  allowed  to  sit  from  1717  until 
1851.  The  parish  clergy  became  lazy  and  poor, 
and  largely  forfeited  the  respect  which  the  sa- 
cred office  should  always  command.    The  par- 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  AGE.  5 

ish  priest  was,  indeed,  "betwixt  the  devil  and 
the  deep  sea."  If,  in  his  preaching  and  his 
work,  he  showed  zeal  and  enthusiasm,  he  was 
suspected  of  being  a  Puritan.  If  he  showed 
reverence  and  decency  in  worship,  he  was  ac- 
cused of  being  a  "Papist  and  a  Jacobite." 

Those  were  the  days  of  the  so-called  "fox- 
hunting parson."  The  well-to-do  incumbents 
lived  like  squires  or  farmers,  doing  but  little 
priestly  work.  The  poor  curates  can  hardly  be 
said  to  have  lived  at  alh^they  starved  along. 

The  civil  government  was  carried  on  by 
bribery  and  corruption.  The  morals  of  the 
nobility  and  upper  classes  were  frightfully  de- 
praved. The  lower  orders  were  sunk  in  pauper- 
ism, drunkenness,  and  brutality. 

Heresy  reared  its  hydra-heads.  Infidelity 
stalked  hideous  through  the  realm.  Unitarian- 
ism,  Deism,  Atheism,  came  in  like  a  flood.  To- 
land,  Shaftesbury,  Collins,  Tindal,  Morgan, 
Chub,  Bolingbroke,  Hume,  these  were  chief 
exponents  of  tbe  anti-Cbristian  philosophy.  It 
was  a  down-grade  unbelief.  "No  dogmatic 
Christianity;  no  historic  Christianity;  no 
Christianity  at  all." 

The  Church,  however,  was  not  dead,  but 


0 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


sleeping.  Her  corporate  voice  was  silenced; 
but  individual  champions  arose,  like  Achilles 
when  he  girded  on  the  armor  his  mother  brought 
him,  and  all  intellectual  assaults  against  re- 
vealed religion  were  fairly  met  and  grandly 
overcome.  Sherlock,  Conybeare,  Berkeley,  War- 
burton,  were,  in  their  special  controversies,  not 
unworthy  successors  of  the  Caroline  divines. 
Horsley  and  the  great  Waterland  expelled  the 
demon  of  Unitarianism  which  was  creeping  in 
the  back  door  of  the  Church.  Bishop  Butler's 
"Analogy,"  on  which  he  spent  the  labor  of 
twenty  years,  laid  Deism  in  the  dust.  It  was 
the  greatest  controversial  book  ever  written. 
It  will  never  die. 

While  the  Church's  great  leaders  were  indi- 
vidually defending  the  outposts  of  revealed  re- 
ligion, the  citadel  was  sadly  neglected.  Church 
principles  were  ignored.  Intellectual  contests 
were  of  small  interest  to  the  masses  who  were 
perishing  for  the  simple  preaching  of  the  Gos- 
pel, the  grace  of  the  Sacraments,  and  the  priv- 
ilege and  inspiration  of  Catholic  worship. 
Burke  has  testified  that  not  more  than  one  out 
of  a  hundred  of  the  population  could  read.  To 
such   people,    of   what   use   were  political 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  AGE. 


7 


harangues,  dull  homilies  on  morality,  and  phil- 
osophical disquisitions  on  the  "reasonableness" 
of  Christianity?  Blackstone  once  said  that 
whenever  he  heard  a  noted  preacher  in  London, 
he  could  never  discern  whether  he  were  a  fol- 
lower of  Confucius,  Mohammed,  or  Christ. 

In  such  an  age  as  this  it  is  not  to  be  won- 
dered that  the  Church,  though  she  kept  her  an- 
cient liturgy  and  law,  word  for  word,  yet  lost 
many  of  the  proprieties  of  worship,  her  old 
Catholic  customs  and  traditions,  the  ritual  and 
the  decorum  of  the  House  of  God.  The  Holy 
Eucharist  was  celebrated  in  most  parish 
churches  but  once  a  month  or  once  a  quarter, 
and  in  some  only  once  a  year.  It  lost  its  place 
as  the  Church's  great  corporate  act  of  worship 
and  of  sacrifice.  Many  people  would  no  longer 
stay  to  the  end  of  the  Communion  Service.  In 
spite  of  the  canon  law  which  requires  all  to 
tarry  for  the  blessing,  they  would  make  an  os- 
tentatious withdrawal  in  the  midst  of  the  ser- 
vice, a  retrocession  which  the  late  Bishop  Coxe 
used  to  call,  "The  Dead  March  of  the  Soul," 
and  which  has  not  yet  ceased.1 


1  It  is  safe  to  say  that  even  now  many  of  the  baptized 
members  of  the  Church  of  England  have  never  even  wit- 


8 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


The  law  of  the  Church  of  England  reenacted 
in  the  Prayer.  Book  of  1662 — and  still  un- 
changed— required  that  the  ancient  eucharistic 
vestments,  lights,  incense,  crosses,  and  other 
accessories  of  worship  and  symbols  of  truth, 
should  "be  retained  and  be  in  use."2  But  in  a 
majority  of  the  churches  not  merely  most  of 
these  things,  but  the  very  memory  of  them,  had 
passed  away.  The  great  Bishop  Butler  was  ac- 
cused of  Bomanism  because  he  had  cross  and 
candles  on  the  altar  of  his  private  chapel. 
Kneeling  in  prayer,  orientating  in  the  Creed* 
and  Gloria  Patri,  reverencing  the  altar  on  en- 
tering and  leaving  the  church,4  even  bowing  at 
the  mention  of  the  holy  name  of  Jesus,6  all  these 
universal  and  beneficent  customs,  the  natural 

nessed  a  single  celebration  of  the  Holy  Eucharist,  nor  heard 
the  "Comfortable  Words,"  nor  joined  in  the  Sacrifice,  nor 
sung  the  Gloria  in  Excelsis,  although  two  post-Reformation 
canons  forbid  any  one  to  withdraw.  See  a  valuable  tract 
by  the  Rev.  John  Going,  entitled  "Attendance  at  Holy  Com- 
munion the  Way  to  Communion." 

2  See  Wirgman's  The  English  Reformation  and  the  Book 
of  Common  Prayer,  pp.  45-49. 

*  See  CJiurchman's  Life  of  Wesley,  p.  67. 

*  Canon  vii.  of  1603-4. 

5  Canon  xviii.  1603-4.  See  Mine's  Presbyterian  Clergy- 
man Looking  for  the  Church,  pp.  236-237  ;  also  Reasons  for 
Being  a  Churchman  (Ed.  of  1905),  pp.  264-5  and  note. 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  AGE.  9 

expression  of  faith,  of  piety,  and  of  love,  fell 
largely  into  disuse. 

The  writer  is  not  now  pleading  for  the  res- 
toration of  these  things.  Most  of  them  have 
already  been  restored ;  and  the  rest  of  them  will 
blossom  again,  as  soon  as  the  remaining  weeds 
of  Puritanism  and  of  worldliness  shall  have 
been  eradicated  from  the  Anglican  heart.  But 
whatever  be  our  individual  opinions  as  to  the 
utility  and  the  desirability  of  some  of  these 
things,  we  must  at  least  remember  that  they  all 
were,  and  are,  a  part  of  the  ecclesiastical  her- 
itage of  the  Church  of  England ;  that  they  have 
never  been  legally  abolished,  but  only  dropped 
— so  far  as  they  have  been  dropped — and  that 
not  in  an  age  of  faith  and  piety,  but  in  the 
darkest  days  of  our  religious  history,  in  an  age 
of  coldness,  of  indifference,  and  of  shockingly 
bad  taste,  in  an  age  of  abounding  heresy  and 
immorality,  when  the  love  of  many  had  waxed 
cold. 

Of  Catholic  ritual,  properly  so-called,  but 
little  remained,  and  that  chiefly  in  the  Cathe- 
drals and  the  collegiate  churches.  For  exam- 
ple, the  ancient  ceremonial  use  of  incense — 
which  had  never  been  abolished  by  law — lin- 


10 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


gered  in  some  of  the  Cathedrals  until  well  into 
the  dark  century,  when  it  was  dropped  at  Ely, 
the  last  Cathedral  which  had  retained  it,  be- 
cause, forsooth,  a  certain  Cathedral  dignitary, 
who  had  the  Italian  habit  of  taking  snuff  dur- 
ing divine  service,  discovered  that  the  combina- 
tion of  incense  and  tobacco  was  distasteful,  and 
so  gave  up,  not  the  snuff,  but  the  incense ! 

One  cause  of  the  darkness  of  this  dark  age 
was  the  fact  that,  in  the  face  of  the  increase 
and  change  of  centers  of  population,  almost  no 
new  church  accommodation  was  provided.  In- 
deed, the  introduction  of  the  ghastly  eighteenth 
century  pews — like  sheep  pens  or  loose  boxes — 
wasted  about  twenty-five  per  cent,  of  the  seating 
capacity  of  the  churches.  Along  with  this 
came  the  unchurchly  custom — against  which 
the  Wesleys  used  to  protest — of  renting  pews, 
so  that  in  many  cases  the  poor  were  practically 
excluded  from  their  Father's  house. 

As  to  music,  of  course  vested  choirs  and 
choral  services  were  retained  in  Cathedrals  and 
in  some  other  churches.  But  in  general  the  mu- 
sic of  the  Church  was  artistically  and  eccle- 
siastically hideous.  The  Psalter,  which  was 
written  to  be  sung,  and  which  used  to  be  so 


THE  CHUECH  AND  THE  AGE.  11 


gloriously  chanted,  was  commonly  read.'  The 
service  was  for  the  most  part  a  dull  dialogue 
between  the  parson  and  the  clerk.  The  people 
sat  through  it  in  spite  of  the  rubrics,  exchanged 
looks  and  nods,  or  whispered  and  dozed.  And 
in  place  of  the  office  hymns — what  shall  I  say  ? 
— they  used  Rouse's  or  some  similar  version  of 
the  Psalms!7 

The  Christian  Year  was  not  lived  up  to. 
The  daily  offices  were  largely  in  abeyance.  The 
Friday  abstinence  was  laughed  at.  The  Saints' 
Days  were  not  generally  observed.  Even  the 
awful  and  precious  solemnities  of  Holy  Week 
were  often  forgotten.  Archbishop  Cornwallis 
was  greeted  with  cries  of  "jSTo  popery,"  because 
he  and  Bishop  Porteus  of  London  had  advocated 
a  better  observance  of  Good  Friday,  which  had 
become  almost  obsolete. 

6  Even  yet  our  congregations  are  strangely  slow  in  de- 
manding of  their  clergy  the  right  to  sing  the  songs  of  "the 
Sweet  Singer  of  Israel." 

7  "Sternhold  and  Hopkins,"  "Tate  and  Brady,"  and 
other  doggerel  translations  of  the  stately  parallelisms  of 
David  were  also  used.  The  version  by  the  Cromwellian 
Rouse  possessed  some  merit  for  his  day,  but  we  cannot  fail 
to  relish  the  satire  of  Dean  Swift's  parodical  apostrophe  : 

"King  David  never  would  acquit 
A  criminal  like  thee, 
Against  his  Psalms  who  could  commit 
Such  wicked  poetrle." 


12 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


It  may  be  asked  what  was  the  condition  of 
the  dissenting  bodies  in  England  all  this  time. 
I  answer  that,  bad  as  the  Church  was,  they  were 
infinitely  worse,  as  the  Wesleys  testify  again 
and  again.  Dissenters  were  few,  anyway. 
Churchmen  had  dropped  so  nearly  to  their  level 
of  worship  and  of  faith,  that,  as  a  sagacious 
writer  has  observed,  "there  was  not  much  to 
dissent  from."  The  few  English  Koman  Cath- 
olics were  the  most  respectable  of  the  Separat- 
ists, but  they  were  bitterly  persecuted  and  kept 
down.  The  English  (but  not  the  Scottish) 
Presbyterians,8  with  hardly  any  exceptions,  ab- 
jured Christianity  and  became  Socinians;  and 
even  the  Independents  and  the  Anabaptists  had 
less  spiritual  life  and  activity  than  the  state- 
ridden  and  semi-protestantized  "Establish- 
ment."' 

Erom  such  a  picture  of  eighteenth  century 
religion,  we  turn  away  with  horror  and  with 
shame. 

A  polar  night,  however,  has  its  moon  and 
stars  and  aurora  borealisj  nor  is  its  darkness 


•  See  Mine's  Presbyterian  Clergyman,  etc.,  p.  148  (Ed. 
of  1871). 

•  See  in  this  connection  Wesley's  55th  Sermon,  §  12. 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  AGE.  13 

perpetual,  for  springtide,  in  slowly  ascending 
circles,  will  bring  back  tbe  sun.  Tbe  picture 
I  have  drawn  is  in  general  outline ;  close  exam- 
ination will  sbow  light  and  hope. 

The  Church,  even  then,  bound  and  gagged 
and  prostrate  beneath  the  heel  of  the  State,  was 
still  "the  Church  of  the  living  God,  the  pillar 
and  ground  of  the  truth."  Her  ministry  was 
lawful;  her  sacraments  (though  often  slovenly 
administered)  were  valid ;  her  Prayer  Book  and 
canon  law,  intact.  In  theory  she  was  all  she  had 
been  in  the  days  of  Bede  or  Anselm,  Wolsey  or 
Bancroft,  Laud  or  Sancroft,  all  that  she  is  to- 
day. In  many  a  household,  as  in  the  land  of 
Goshen,  there  was  light.  At  the  universities, 
patristic  learning,  while  not  in  vogue,  was  by 
no  means  extinct,  and  among  the  non- jurors 
was  predominant.  In  some  parishes  the  priest 
was  a  model  of  all  a  parish  priest  should  be. 
Goldsmith's  country  parson,  in  "The  Deserted 
Village,"  was  no  isolated  example.10    For  some 

10  "At  church  with  meek  and  unaffected  grace, 
His  looks  adorned  the  venerable  place ; 
Truth  from  his  lips  prevailed  with  double  sway, 
And  fools  who  came  to  scoff,  remained  to  pray. 
Even  children  followed  with  endearing  wile, 
And  plucked  his  gown,  to  share  the  good  man's  smile." 
Etc.,  etc. 


u 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


years  a  number  of  religious  guilds  or  sodalities, 
founded  soon  after  the  Restoration,  kept  alive, 
in  a  quiet  way,  Catholic  Faith,  Catholic  devo- 
tion, and  holy  living."  There  were  still  tender 
and  burdened  souls  who  availed  themselves  of 
spiritual  direction  and  "the  benefit  of  Absolu- 
tion," and  not  a  few  who  communicated  rev- 
erently before  partaking  of  common  food.  In 
some  parishes  early  Communions,  the  proper  ob- 
servance of  all  Feasts  and  Fasts,  and  daily  ser- 
vices were  maintained;  and  in  many,  alms- 
giving and  works  of  mercy  for  the  bodies  and 

11  "The  corruption  of  manners  which  had  been  general 
since  the  Restoration,  was  combatted  by  societies  for  the 
Reformation  of  Manners,  which  in  the  last  years  of  the 
seventeenth  century  acquired  extraordinary  dimensions. 
They  began  in  certain  private  societies,  which  arose  in  the 
reign  of  James  II.  (A.  D.  1685-9),  chiefly  under  the  au- 
spices of  Beveridge  and  Bishop  Horneck.  These  societies 
were  at  first  purely  devotional,  and  they  appear  to  have 
been  almost  identical  in  character  with  those  of  the  early 
Methodists. 

"They  held  prayer  meetings,  weekly  communions,  and 
Bible  readings ;  they  sustained  charities,  and  distributed 
religious  books,  and  they  cultivated  a  warmer,  and  more 
ascetic  type  of  devotion  than  was  common  in  the  Church. 
Societies  of  this  description  sprung  up  in  almost  every  con- 
siderable city  in  England,  and  even  in  some  of  those  in 
Ireland." — Lecky's  England  in  the  Eighteenth  Century,  II., 
594-5. 

Many  of  these  societiea  were  still  in  existence  In  1738, 
and  "received  Wesley  with  open  arms."  They  seem  to  have 
formed  a  nucleus  for  his  "United  Societies."  (See  Church- 
man's Life  of  Wesley,  Ap.  ill.) 


THE  CHURCH  AND  THE  AGE. 


15 


the  souls  of  men.  The  Church  was  still  the 
Church,  and  as  such,  capable  of  recovery  and 
rejuvenation. 

Even  in  the  Erastian  episcopate  there  were 
some  bright  and  shining  lights — learned,  pious, 
Catholic-minded  men :  Wake,  Potter,  Gibson, 
Waterland,  Butler,  Conybeare,  Berkeley, 
Lowth,  and  sainted  Wilson,  Apostle  of  the  Isle 
of  Man.  But  the  average  of  religion  and 
Churchmanship  in  the  century — "the  withered, 
unbelieving,  second-hand  eighteenth  century," 
as  Carlyle  calls  it — was  as  I  have  described  it. 


CHAPTER  II. 


THE  STUDENT  AND  THE  MISSIONARY. 

TT  was  in  such  general  darkness,  coldness, 
sloth,  Protestant  Erastianism,  degradation, 
and  neglect  that  John  Wesley  arose,  an  Anglo- 
Catholic  zealot,  a  root  out  of  a  dry  ground. 

His  life  practically  coincided  with  the  cen- 
tury, 1703  to  1791.  He  came  of  gentle  blood 
on  both  sides.  He  called  himself  "a  High 
Churchman  and  the  son  of  a  High  Churchman." 
His  father  was  a  learned  and  pious  priest,  of 
the  "high  and  dry"  Ecclesiastical-Tory  type; 
his  mother,  a  true  gentlwoman  and  a  saint  of 
the  Church  Militant.  He  appears  to  have  been 
confirmed,  and  certainly  made  his  first  Com- 
munion when  eight  years  old.  Educated  at 
the  Charterhouse  School  in  London,  he  won  a 


THE  STUDENT  AND  THE  MISSIONARY.  17 


scholarship  at  Christ  Church,  Oxford,  being  al- 
ready, at  seventeen  years  of  age,  a  fine  Greek, 
Latin,  and  Hebrew  scholar. 

At  Oxford  he  read  hard,  and  lived  a  chaste 
and  frugal  life.  He  took  deacon's  orders  at  the 
hands  of  Bishop  Potter  in  1725.  The  follow- 
ing year  he  received  a  fellowship  in  "the  Col- 
lege of  the  Blessed  Virgin  Mary  and  All 
Saints,"  commonly  called  Lincoln  College — an 
institution  exclusively  of  divines,  founded  "to 
overturn  all  heresies  and  defend  the  Catholic 
Faith." 

Here  he  was  at  once  made  "Greek  Lecturer" 
and  "Moderator  of  the  Classes."  He  never 
knew  what  it  was  to  have  a  vacation.  His  read- 
ing was  prodigious.  Mondays  and  Tuesdays  he 
devoted  to  Greek  and  Latin;  Wednesdays,  to 
logic  and  ethics;  Thursdays,  to  Hebrew  and 
Arabic;  Fridays,  to  metaphysics  and  natural 
philosophy;  Saturdays,  to  oratory  and  poetry; 
Sundays,  to  divinity.  He  always  rose  at  four 
o'clock,  and  worked  about  eighteen  hours  a  day 
for  the  rest  of  his  life. 

His  university  career  was  interrupted  for 
two  years,  which  he  spent  as  curate  to  his  father 
in  two  rural  parishes.    He  was  ordered  priest 


18 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


in  1728,  and  returning  to  Oxford  resumed  his 
old  work,  from  1729  to  1735,  making  thirteen 
years  of  Oxford  residence  and  unremitting 
study. 

At  the  time  of  his  eventful  return  to  the 
university  he  was  a  learned  High  Churchman, 
with  unusual  love  and  appreciation  of  the  early 
Church,  but  still  rather  of  the  "high  and  dry" 
Anglican  type.  He  now  outgrew  the  "dry," 
and  became  an  unqualified  High  Churchman; 
what  we  call  (and  correctly,  for  it  is  a  right  use 
of  the  word)  a  Catholic;2  or,  as  one  has  said, 
"a  Puseyite,  a  hundred  years  before  Dr. 
Pusey." 

The  writings  of  Mr.  William  Law,  a  non- 
juring  Catholic-minded  clergyman,  awakened  in 
John  Wesley  and  in  his  younger  brother, 
Charles,  a  passion  for  holiness — for  the  re- 
ligious life — which  lifts  them  to  the  plane 
of  saintship.  He  now  becomes  the  head  of  a 
little  coterie  of  young  men,  like-minded,  whom 
his  brother  Charles  had  gathered  about  him 
and  organized  into  a  club.    They  read  to- 

"  Throughout  this  book  I  use  the  word  Church  as  Wes- 
ley used  it.  For  the  meaning  of  Catholic,  see  Mason's  Faith 
of  the  Oospel,  chap.  vill. ;  also  Reasons  for  Being  a  Church- 
man, p.  195  (Ed.  of  1905). 


THE  STUDENT  AND  THE  MISSIONARY.  19 

gether  (chiefly  the  Greek  Testament)  every 
night.  They  are  staunch  Churchmen.  They 
fast  every  Friday,  as  the  Prayer  Book  enjoins, 
and  even  every  Wednesday,  as  did  many  of 
the  early  Christians.  They  observe  Lent. 
They  communicate  every  Sunday  and  holy  day, 
though  crowds  of  their  fellow  students  jeer 
at  them,  as  they  make  their  way  to  the  altar 
of  St.  Mary's,  or  Christ  Church,  the  only  two 
altars  in  Oxford  at  which  there  was  at  that  time 
a  weekly  Eucharist.  They  are  nick-named 
"Methodists,"  on  account  of  their  strict  observ- 
ance of  the  methods  of  the  Church  as  prescribed 
in  the  statutes  of  the  college.  They  visit  the 
schools,  the  sick,  the  poor,  the  prisoners.  They 
keep  themselves  unspotted  from  the  world. 
They  devote  to  charity  their  entire  incomes 
above  the  barest  living  expenses — and  our 
zealot  continues  to  do  so  all  of  his  life,  giving 
to  charity  a  quarter  of  a  million  of  dollars  of 
his  hard  earnings,  and  dying  poor.  They  are 
rigorously  orthodox.  They  are  practically 
identical  with  the  leaders  of  the  greater  Oxford 
Movement  of  seventy  years  ago. 

Of  our  zealot,  in  particular,  it  may  be  in- 
controvertibly  affirmed  that  his  Christianity 


20 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


was  scriptural,  dogmatic,  historical,  sacerdotal, 
sacramental,  missionary,  and  practical,  and  that 
he  never  changed  it  to  the  day  of  his  death." 

He  hears  now  a  Macedonian  cry  from  the 
motley  colonists  and  savage  red  men  of  far  off 
Georgia.  To  leave  Oxford  for  any  spot  on 
earth  must  always  he  a  sacrifice.  To  leave 
Oxford  for  the  wilderness  of  America  in  1735, 
to  labor  among  savage  pagans  and — must  I  say 
it? — savage  Christians,  was  nothing  less  than 
self-immolation.  But  he  is  eager  for  it;  while 
his  Christian-Spartan  mother  exclaims:  "Had 
I  twenty  sons,  I  should  rejoice  that  they  were 
all  so  employed,  though  I  should  never  see  them 
more  I" 

After  a  perilous  voyage,  our  zealot  begins 
his  work  as  the  active  parish  priest  of  Savannah. 
Beside  two  daily  services,  immense  pastoral 
duty,  and  teaching  both  by  day  and  by  night, 
his  ordinary  Sunday  work  was  as  follows  (and 
at  all  or  most  of  the  services  there  appear  to 
have  been  sermons  or  instructions)  : 

18  He  was  seventy-two  years  old  when  he  wrote  to  Lord 
Stanhope,  "I  am  a  High  Churchman  and  the  son  of  a  High 
Churchman."  In  1789  he  declared :  "I  hold  all  the  doc- 
trines of  the  Church  of  England.  I  love  her  liturgy.  I  ap- 
prove her  plan  of  discipline.  I  have  been  true  to  my  pro- 
fession from  1730  to  this  day." — Sermon  on  Heb.  v.  4, 
Works,  Vol.  VII.,  pp.  277-280. 


THE  STUDENT  AND  THE  MISSIONARY.  21 


From  5  to  6:30,  Matins  and  Litany;  at  9, 
service  in  Italian;  from  10:30  to  12:30,  the 
Holy  Eucharist  as  the  Church's  chief  office  of 
sacrifice  and  praise;  at  2,  catechising  of  child- 
ren; at  3  Evensong;  and  in  the  evening,  a  lec- 
ture or  Bible  class.  On  Saturdays  also  he 
conducted  services  in  French  and  in  German  in 
neighboring  settlements.  He  even  learns  Span- 
ish, so  as  to  do  something  for  the  poor  Spanish 
Jews  of  the  colony.  He  seems,  like  Bishop 
Patteson,  to  have  the  Pentecostal  gift  of 
tongues. 

Every  detail  of  this  work,  worship,  teaching, 
and  discipline — including  the  hearing  of  con- 
fessions— he  carried  out  on  the  strict  lines  of 
the  Prayer  Book.  But  like  many  a  priest, 
both  in  England  and  in  America  since  his  day, 
he  found  "old  Adam  too  strong  for  young  Me- 
lanchthon."  This  conglomerate  of  eighteenth 
century  Anglicans,  with  German,  French,  and 
Italian  Protestants,  did  not  appreciate,  and  did 
not  wish,  the  Catholic  religion  of  the  Book  of 
Common  Prayer.  And  so  they  made  the  place 
impossible  for  him.  It  is  true,  he  did  not  use 
the  gentleness  and  the  tact,  in  dealing  with 
weak  and  erring  souls,  which  every  zealot  for 


22 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


Christ  has  to  learn  by  hitter  experience.  Cer- 
tainly the  Anglo-Catholics  of  to-day  have 
learned  it;  and  now  have  the  ear  of  all  people 
because  they  have  won  their  hearts  and  com- 
manded their  respect. 

Our  fiery  young  devotee  made  enemies,  did 
some  rash  things,  and  became  involved  in  a  law- 
suit, lie  was  disappointed,  too,  in  his  work 
among  the  Indians.  At  this  time  also  he  had 
the  bitter  trial  of  a  disappointment  in  a  pure 
and  honest  love.  And  so  with  a  sad  heart  he 
returned  to  England,  for  awhile — and  naturally 
— a  crushed  and  melancholy  man. 

Wesley  himself  underestimated  the  perma- 
nent value  of  his  work  in  Georgia.  It  was, 
however,  far  from  being  a  failure.  His  suc- 
cessor, Mr.  Whitefield,  declared:  "The  good 
Mr.  John  Wesley  has  done  in  America  is  inex- 
pressible. His  name  is  very  precious  among 
the  people,  and  he  has  laid  a  foundation  that  I 
hope  neither  men  nor  devils  will  ever  be  able 
to  shake." 

In  this  trying  period,  Wesley  had  the  mis- 
fortune to  fall  under  the  influence  of  those 
morbid,  ascetic,  but  lovable  pietists,  the  Mo- 
ravians.   It  is  crnel  injustice  to  such  a  man  to 


THE  STUDENT  AND  THE  MISSIONARY.  23 


place  much  stress  on  hasty  and  frantic  words 
uttered  at  such  a  time.  He  wrote  in  his  jour- 
nal: "I  went  to  America  to  convert  the  In- 
dians ;  but  oh !  who  shall  convert  me  ?"  But  he 
himself,  when  years  after,  his  eye  fell  on  the 
sentence  quoted  above,  wrote  on  the  margin: 
"I  am  not  so  sure  of  this."  He  had  also  writ- 
ten :  "I  am  a  child  of  wrath,  an  heir  of  hell." 
But  in  his  old  age  he  added  a  note,  "I  believe 
not."  That  entry  in  the  journal,  says  he,  "was 
wrote  in  the  anguish  of  my  heart,  to  which  I 
gave  vent  between  God  and  my  own  soul." 
Let  us  cover  it  with  the  mantle  of  love  and 
pity.  If  this  man  were  not  a  true  Christian 
in  Oxford  and  in  Georgia,  "God  help  the  'true 
Christians'  of  to-day  !"  In  the  calm  retrospect 
of  his  sixty-ninth  year  he  writes:  "Vitce  me 
redde  priori" — Give  me  back  to  my  former  life 
— "Let  me  be  again  an  Oxford  Methodist.  I  did 
then  walk  closely  with  God,  and  redeem  the 
time." 

The  same  will  apply  to  all  this  good  man's 
talk  about  his  never  having  been  a  Christian, 
when  for  awhile  the  Moravians  had  instilled 
into  his  broken  heart  the  heresy  that  no  one 
could  be  a  Christian  until  he  had  experienced 


24 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


instantaneous  conversion,  and  felt  a  "full  assur- 
ance" of  salvation.  He  thought  he  received 
this  soon  after ;  and  for  a  time,  while  under  the 
illusion,  he  and  his  brother,  Charles,  preached 
the  necessity  of  it  to  the  people.  But  in  his 
mature  age  he  left  on  record:  "I  marvel  that 
they  did  not  stone  us!"  and  he  expresses  the 
hope  that  his  followers  "know  better  now."14 

Some  smoke  from  this  Moravian  furnace 
dimmed  for  a  time  his  spiritual  vision ;  and  left 
henceforth,  as  it  were,  the  smell  of  fire  about 
his  garments.  But  it  did  not  destroy  his  alle- 
giance to  the  Church. 

And  here  it  must  be  remarked  that  Wesley 
honestly  thought — as  indeed  many  other  good 
Churchmen  have  thought  until  quite  recently 
— that  the  Moravian  sect,  possessing  as  it  does 
much  of  truth  and  piety  and  grace,  was  really 
a  portion  of  the  Catholic  Church  with  the  Apos- 
tolic episcopate  and  valid  sacraments.  Other- 
wise, he  would  have  had  nothing  whatever  to 
do  with  it.  A  visit  to  their  headquarters  in 
Germany  and  a  long  interview  with  their  chief, 
Count  Zinzendorf — that  mixture  of  piety,  fa- 

"  Letter  to  Melville,  Southey's  Life  of  Wesley,  I.,  251 
(Ed.  of  1846). 


THE  STUDENT  AND  THE  MISSIONARY.  25 


naticism,  and  pride — soon  opened  his  eyes. 
Though  retaining  kindly  feelings  toward  the 
Moravians,  he  broke  from  their  snares.  The 
clouds  rolled  away.  Nor  was  the  Father's 
face  ever  again  hidden  from  him.  He  lived 
in  grace  and  in  peace,  in  conscious  communion 
with  God,  and  in  love  and  burning  zeal  for 
souls. 


CHAPTER  III. 


LIFE  WOKK. 

771  ESLEY  now  entered  on  a  career  of  work 
such  as  no  other  mortal  man  ever  accom- 
plished, a  career  which  can  be  appreciated  only 
by  understanding  the  sloth,  the  formalism,  the 
Protestant  Erastianism,  amid  which  he  blazed 
forth  like  a  comet  athwart  the  midnight  sky. 
From  1739,  when  he  was  thirty-six  years  of  age, 
until  1791,  in  his  eighty-eighth  year,  he  trav- 
elled, mostly  on  horseback,  by  bad  roads  and  no 
roads,  two  hundred  and  twenty-five  thousand 
miles,  an  average  of  four  thousand  and  five  hun- 
dred miles  a  year,  preaching  (in  addition  to  con- 
ference addresses)  more  than  forty  thousand 
sermons,  an  average,  say,  of  one  thousand  a 
year,  an  average  of  three  or  four  every  day,  the 


LIFE  WORK. 


27 


first  always  at  five  o'clock  in  the  morning; 
preaching  in  churches  and  houses,  but  chiefly  in 
the  open  air,  sometimes  to  audiences  of  twenty 
thousand  at  once.  Nor  was  this  all.  His  powers 
of  organization  and  of  leadership  were  like  a 
Loyola's  or  a  Napoleon's.  He  founded  hundreds 
of  societies,  and  governed  them  with  more  than 
Napoleonic  vigor  and  mastery  of  detail.  He 
established  and  managed  schools  and  hospitals. 
He  wrote  infinite  letters.  He  maintained  his 
old  studies.  He  kept  abreast  of  the  literature, 
the  science,  the  politics,  the  controversies,  the 
philanthropies  of  the  age.  He  edited  papers 
and  magazines.  He  wrote  and  compiled  more 
than  two  hundred  volumes. 

He  conceived  and  created  within  the  Church 
a  vast  body  of  lay  preachers,  or  "lay  helpers," 
as  he  commonly  called  them,  something  like  our 
lay  readers,  but  more  like  our  preaching  friars 
of  the  thirteenth  century.  His  work  was 
chiefly  among  the  poor,  the  outcast,  the 
neglected — as  he  says,  "the  lost  sheep  of  the 
Church  of  England."  Though  a  gentleman, 
born  and  bred,  and  at  home  in  the  most  intel- 
lectual society  of  the  age,  with  such  men  as  Dr. 
Johnson  and  Bishop  Lowth,  his  heart  was  with 


28 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


the  lowly.  The  worldliness,  the  sensuality,  the 
materialism  of  the  rich  he  could  not  abide. 
"Cultivated  pagans,"  says  he,  "commonly  called 
Christians" !  His  preaching  was  such  as  Eng- 
land had  never  heard  before.  Crowds  hung 
breathless  on  his  simple,  practical,  earnest,  and 
awful  words.  Throughout  the  length  and 
breadth  of  England,  Scotland,  Ireland,  and  the 
adjacent  isles,  he  raised  the  fallen,  enlightened 
the  ignorant,  strengthened  the  faithful,  roused 
the  indifferent,  and  brought  back  thousands  and 
tens  of  thousands  to  the  Mother  Church. 
Truly  it  may  be  said  of  him:  "He  behaved 
himself  uprightly  in  the  conversion  of  the 
people,  and  took  away  the  abominations  of 
iniquity.""  In  some  parishes  a  majority  of 
the  worshippers  were  men  and  women  whom 
Wesley  had  reclaimed  from  unbelief  and 
viciousness  of  life. 

His  followers  he  gathered  into  classes  and 
conferences,  a  vast  guild  or  brotherhood  within 
the  Church — something  like  our  great  Brother- 
hood of  St.  Andrew.  They  met  together  for 
prayer,  Bible  study,  exhortation,  and  the  singing 
of  hymns,  to  supplement  the  work  of  the  Church, 


»  Ecclus.  xllr.  2. 


LIFE  WORK. 


29 


but  only  at  such  hours  as  would  not  clash  with 
the  hours  of  the  regular  Church  services.  Wes- 
ley compiled  the  first  vernacular  hymn  book  of 
the  English  Church.  He  believed  that  muaic 
is  the  handmaid  of  Eeligion.  He  loved  the 
music  of  the  Communion  service.  After  his 
visit  to  Exeter  in  1782,  he  wrote  in  his  journal : 
"I  was  much  pleased  with  the  decent  behavior 
of  the  whole  congregation  at  the  Cathedral,  and 
also  with  the  solemn  music  at  the  Post-Com- 
munion— one  of  the  finest  compositions  I  ever 
heard." 

Schism  or  separation  from  the  Church  he 
regarded  not  only  as  unnecessary  and  inexpe- 
dient, but  as  a  folly  and  a  sin.  Dissenters  he 
allowed  to  attend  his  ministrations,  with  a  view 
to  reclaiming  them ;  but  every  feature  of  dissent 
he  conscientiously  detested  and  abhorred,  mak- 
ing it  a  habit  of  his  life — from  which  he  rarely 
ever  departed — not  to  set  foot  inside  their  con- 
venticles. Even  dissenting  Baptism,  "lay  Bap- 
tism," as  he  called  it,  he  (mistakenly,  I  think, 
but  emphatically)  refused  to  allow. 

That  such  zeal  in  the  midst  of  sloth,  such 
Catholicity  in  the  midst  of  a  fossilized  Protest- 
antism, such  trumpet  blasts  in  the  catacombs 


30 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


of  the  dead,  should  stir  up  the  dry  bones  and 
rouse  opposition,  is  not  strange.  The  wonder 
is  that  the  hostility  was  not  greater.  It  must 
be  remembered,  too,  that  our  zealot  began  this 
great  work  under  the  suspicion  of  Moravian 
heresy  which  merited  anathema.  Then  the  ex- 
cesses and  bad  taste  of  many  of  his  followers 
— though  Wesley  himself  was  never  guilty  of 
sensationalism,  bad  taste,  or  any  vulgarity — 
caused  natural  suspicion.  The  novelty  of  his 
methods,  such  as  the  employment  of  lay  helpers, 
and  preaching  in  the  open  air,  with  his  disre- 
gard of  parish  bounds  (for  which,  however,  he 
claimed  a  technical  justification),18  led  many  to 
fear  that  the  movement  was  really  sectarian; 
while,  on  the  other  hand,  his  bold  proclamation 
of  the  Catholic  doctrine  and  practice  of  the 
Prayer  Book,  produced  a  widespread  suspicion 
of  Romanism,  so  that  this  loyal  Anglo-Catholic 

10  His  alleged  canonical  excuse  was  as  follows  :  "Being 
ordained  a  priest,  by  the  commission  I  then  received,  I  am  a 
priest  of  the  Church  Universal  ;  and  being  ordained  as  fel- 
low of  a  college,  I  was  not  limited  to  any  particular  cure, 
but  have  an  indeterminate  commission  to  preach  the  Word 
of  God  in  any  part  of  the  Church  of  England.  I  conceive 
not,  therefore,  that  in  preaching  here  by  this  commission  I 
break  any  human  law." — Wesley's  conversation  with  Bishop 
Butler. 


LIFE  WORK. 


31 


was  constantly  greeted  with  the  silly  cry  of 
"No  popery !" 

At  the  start,  therefore,  most  of  the  parish 
clergy,  very  naturally,  refused  to  invite  this 
zealot  and  his  brother  Charles  to  preach  in  the 
parish  churches.  Yet,  be  it  well  understood, 
no  formal  ecclesiastical  censure  ivas  ever  visited 
upon  them.  Most  of  the  Bishops  treated  them 
with  courtesy  and  consideration,  some  with 
friendship  and  confidence.  The  worst  opposi- 
tion the  Wesleys  encountered  was,  first,  from 
low  mobs;  and,  second,  from  Calvinists.  As 
their  loyalty  to  the  Church  became  apparent, 
they  were  in  demand  as  preachers  in  the  parish 
churches  all  over  the  land.  And  they  them- 
selves would  have  died  rather  than  leave  the 
Church.  Certain  it  is  that,  in  spite  of  their 
giving  offense  and  some  reasonable  grounds  of 
suspicion,  they  were  treated  an  hundred  times 
better  than  Keble,  Pusey,  Neale,  Littledale, 
Lowder,  ATackonochie,  Tooth,  Enraght,  Bell- 
Coxe,  Dolling,  the  Bishop  of  Brechin,  the  Bish- 
op of  Lincoln,  and  many  another  true  Wesleyan 
of  our  day. 


CHAPTEK  IV. 


DOCTEINAL  POSITION. 

TPEOPOSE  now  to  show  the  status  of  this 
Anglican  zealot  on  certain  fundamental 
principles  of  the  Church,  and  his  loyalty  to  the 
Church. 

As  to  the  three  Creeds  and  the  Articles,  as 
to  the  Bible  and  Prayer  Book,  with  all  that  they 
contain,  he  believed  them  all,  he  stood  for  them 
all,  he  fought  for  them  all.  He  was  even  far 
above  the  average  Anglican  priest  of  to-day 
in  what — for  want  of  a  better  word — we  may 
call  Churchmanship. 

He  always  believed  and  taught  the  Catholic 
doctrine  of  Baptismal  Regeneration.  He  never 
denied  it;  he  never  doubted  it;  though  un- 
fortunately he  used  the  word  regeneration  in  a 


DOCTRINAL  POSITION.  33 

secondary  and  figurative  sense  also,  as  equiv- 
alent to  conversion.  This  was  a  mistake,  a 
far-reaching  blunder.  But  the  blunder  on  his 
part  was  philological  rather  than  theological. 

In  his  "Treatise  on  Baptism,"  published  in 
1756,  and  republished  by  himself  verbatim,  in 
1773,  he  says: 

"By  Baptism,  we  who  were  by  nature  children  of 
wrath,  are  hereby  made  the  children  of  God.  And  this 
regeneration  which  our  Church  in  so  many  places 
ascribes  to  Baptism  is  more  than  barely  being  admitted 
into  the  Church,  although  commonly  connected  there- 
with. Being  grafted  into  the  Body  of  Christ,  we  are 
made  the  children  of  God  by  adoption  and  grace.  This 
is  grounded  on  the  plain  words  of  our  Lord,  'Except  a 
man  be  born  of  water  and  of  the  Spirit,  he  cannot  enter 
the  kingdom  of  God.'  By  water,  then — as  a  means — 
we  are  regenerated,  or  born  again.  ...  In  the 
ordinary  way  there  is  no  other  means  (than  Baptism) 
of  entering  into  the  Church  or  into  heaven." 

As  to  the  Sacrament  of  Confirmation,  Wes- 
ley believed  that  through  the  laying  on  of  the 
Bishop's  hands,  with  prayer,  the  Holy  Ghost 
is  given  to  the  baptized.  He  was  urged  by 
Fletcher  of  Madeley,  under  certain  contingen- 
cies to  administer  Confirmation  himself.  But 
this  he  refused  to  do.  He  emphasized  the  prac- 
tice of  Confirmation  in  the  early  Church.  He 
says:  "Immediately  after  Baptism,  they  were 


34 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


presented  to  the  Bishop  to  be  confirmed  by 
prayer  and  the  imposition  of  hands."" 

17  See  Wesley's  own  ed.  of  his  works  (1791),  IX.  16. 
For  tbe  following  note  I  am  indebted  to  The  Church  Times: 
"There  is  never  a  word  of  John  Wesley's  to  imply  that 
'he  did  not  believe  in  Confirmation,  nor  allow  his  followers 
to  be  confirmed,'  or  'take  any  steps  to  prevent  his  followers 
from  receiving  Confirmation  in  their  parish  church.'  On 
the  contrary,  it  is  certain  that  at  the  period  when  Wesley 
received  Valton  and  Hanby  into  tbe  number  of  his  preach- 
ers, he  was  himself  strongly  convinced  that  the  baptized 
received  the  gift  of  the  Holy  Ghost  'when,  after  Baptism, 
they  were  presented  to  the  Bishop  to  be  confirmed,  by 
prayer  and  Imposition  of  Hands.'  Indeed,  Wesley  went 
further  than  this.  One  of  his  arguments  in  confutation  of  a 
'current  opinion  that  Christians  are  not  now  to  receive 
tbe  Holy  Ghost,'  and  that  it  is  mere  'enthusiasm'  for  those 
who  are  already  Christians  to  expect  such  a  gift,  is  drawn 
from  the  Church's  'Order  of  Confirmation,  or  Laying  on  of 
Hands  upon  those  that  are  Baptized.'  John  Wesley  argued : 
'From  these  passages  it  may  sufficiently  appear  for  what 
purposes  every  Christian,  according  to  the  doctrine  of  the 
Church  of  England,  does  now  receive  ihe  Holy  Ghost  .  .  . 
It  is  to  give  them,  what  none  can  deny  to  be  essential  to 
all  Christians,  in  all  ages,  those  holy  fruits  of  the  Spirit 
which  whoever  hath  not  is  none  of  His.'  The  Holy  Spirit 
Is  'the  Promise  of  the  Father,'  not  simply  to  convert  In- 
fidels or  heathens  into  Christians,  but  to  Christians  them- 
selves, to  confirm,  strengthen,  edify,  and  sanctify  them  in 
that  Christianity  which  they  already  have.  Mr.  Holden,  In 
his  John  Wesley  in  Company  with  High  Churchmen,  most 
aptly  cites  Wesley's  deliberate  and  somewhat  defiant  lan- 
guage in  his  'Hymn  of  Petition  and  Thanksgiving  for  the 
Promise  of  the  Father' : 

"  'The  Grace,  but  not  the  Spirit  of  grace, 

Their  learned  fools  vouchsafe  to  allow: 
He  might  be  given  in  Ancient  days, 

But  God,  they  teach,  Is  needless  now. 
"  'But  God,  we  know,  is  given  in  deed, 

And  still  doth  in  His  People  dwell.' 
"John  Wesley  was  here  contending,  as  Mr.  Holden  says, 


DOCTRINAL  POSITION. 


35 


Again,  in  Wesley's  "Notes  on  the  New 
Testament" — one  of  the  legal  standards  of 
Wesleyan  doctrine — we  have  the  following 
words,  which  are  conclusive  as  to  their  author 
having  held  the  Catholic  doctrine  on  Confirma- 
tion: 

Hebrews  vi.  I,  "And  when  they  believed,  they  were 
to  be  baptized  in  the  baptism  of  Christ.  The  next  thing 
was  to  lay  hands  upon  them  that  they  might  receive 
the  Holy  Ghost." 

As  to  the  Holy  Eucharist  (which  is  after 
all  the  real  test  of  Churchmanship),  Wesley 
believed  it  to  be  a  sacrifice  offered  to  God  as  a 
perpetual  memorial  of  the  one  great  Sacrifice 
on  Calvary;  that  only  a  priest,  episcopally  or- 


'agalnst  the  argument  entertained  even  by  (some)  Bishops 
— the  ministers  of  this  Apostolic  Ordinance — that  not  the 
Holy  Ghost,  but  a  grace  of  the  Blessed  Spirit,  was  what  was 
given.'  In  the  whole  of  this  argument  Wesley  kept  close 
to  what  he  had  learned  from  the  best  and  holiest  of  all 
his  human  teachers,  William  Law,  the  real  father  of  all  that 
was  wholesome  and  permanent,  as  of  all  that  was  Catholic 
In  the  Methodist  movement.  Wesley  was  undoubtedly  an 
opportunist ;  and  was  often  led  to  inconsistent  action,  as 
his  friend  Walker  of  Truro  said,  by  confusing  'expediency' 
with  'principle.'  But  had  he  been  the  man  imaginatively 
pictured  by  Dr.  Rigg,  he  would  have  administered  Confirma- 
tion himself  as  a  presbyter,  after  the  pattern  of  the  'Re- 
formed Churches,'  which  he  certainly  did  not,  nor  empower 
even  his  'superintendent,'  Coke,  to  do  in  America,  so  far 
as  we  are  aware." 


36 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


dained,  can  consecrate  the  Blessed  Sacrament; 
that  for  others  to  do  so  would  be  "a  sin" ;  that 
the  Lord's  Table  is  properly  (as  the  English 
canons  affirm)  an  altar.18  He  believed  in  the 
Real  Presence  and  in  Eucharistic  adoration. 
He  maintained  Sunday  and  all  holy  day  Com- 
munions, and  daily  Eucharists  during  the  oc- 
taves of  the  high  festivals.  He  was  far  in  ad- 
vance of  his  age  in  insisting  on  the  "mixed  chal- 
ice" and  the  use  of  the  credence  or  prothesis. 
He  and  his  brother  believed  the  daily  celebra- 
tion of  the  Holy  Eucharist  to  be  the  Church's 
ideal,  as  the  following  stanza  of  one  of  their 
hymns  shows : 

"0  would'st  Thou  to  Thy  Church  return, 
For  which  the  faithful  remnant  sighs, 
For  which  the  drooping  nations  mourn; 
Restore  the  daily  Sacrifice." 

The  following  extracts  from  his  Eucharis- 
tic devotions  and  instructions  speak  for  them- 
selves : 

"I  come  to  Thee  with  hope  and  reverence,  and 
believe  that  Thou  art  present  in  this  Sacrament. 

"I  enjoy  Thee  in  this  Sacrament  truly  present, 
though  hidden  under  another  representation." 


"Canon  VII.,  1603-4. 

18  Wesley's  "Companion  for  the  Altar." 


DOCTRINAL  POSITION. 


37 


"We  freely  own  that  Christ  is  to  be  adored  in  the 
Lord's  Supper;  but  that  the  elements  are  to  be  adored 

we  deny."20 

That  both  John  and  Charles  Wesley  held  the 
highest  sacramental  doctrine  is  evident  from 
their  hymns,  which  they  continued  to  publish 
as  long  as  they  lived,  and  for  the  teaching  of 
which  each  held  himself  to  be  individually  re- 
sponsible. It  would  be  diffictilt  to  state  the 
Catholic  doctrine  of  the  Eucharist  more  clearly 
than  it  is  stated  in  these  hymns.  Notice,  for 
instance,  the  following  extracts: 

"Now  on  the  sacred  table  laid, 
Thy  Flesh  becomes  our  Food, 
Thy  Life  is  to  our  souls  conveyed 
In  Sacramental  Blood. 

"Yet  may  we  celebrate  below, 
And  daily  thus  Thy  offering  show, 

Exposed  before  Thy  Father's  eyes; 
In  this  tremendous  Mystery 
Present  Thee  bleeding  on  the  tree, 

Our  everlasting  Sacrifice. 

"Thou  dost  even  now  Thy  banquet  crown, 
To  every  faithful  soul  appear, 
And  show  Thy  Real  Presence  here." 

A  thoughtful  and  accurate  writer  has  ob- 
served : 

"As  to  any  supposed  change  in  Wesley's  principles 
respecting  the  sacraments,  over  and  over  again  did  he 
declare  that  he  had  never  varied  at  all  from  the  doctrine 


20  Note  that  these  words,  written  in  1749,  were  re- 
affirmed and  reprinted  by  Wesley  himself  in  1773,  v.,  788. 


38 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


of  the  Church  of  England.  Three  years  before  his 
death  he  published  a  sermon  on  'The  Duty  of  Constant 
Communion,'  'written  above  five-and-fifty  years  before 
for  the  use  of  his  pupils  in  Oxford,'  in  which  the  Holy 
Eucharist  is  termed  a  'sacrifice,'  and  the  Lord's  Table 
an  'altar';  'thanking  God  that  he  had  not  yet  seen 
cause  to  alter  his  sentiments  in  any  point  which  is 
there  delivered,'  and  that  'in  the  course  of  fifty  years 
he  and  his  brother  were  not  conscious  of  varying  from 
the  Church  in  any  point  of  doctrine.'  " 

With  respect  to  the  grace  and  authority  of 
Holy  Orders,  Wesley  wrote  in  1745 : 

"We  believe  it  would  not  be  right  for  us  to  admin- 
ister either  Baptism  or  the  Lord's  Supper,  unless  we 
had  a  commission  so  to  do  from  those  Bishops  whom  we 
apprehend  to  be  in  a  succession  [the  italics  are  Wesley's] 
from  the  Apostles.  .  .  .  We  believe  there  is  and 
always  was  in  every  Christian  Church  (whether  depend- 
ent on  the  Bishop  of  Rome  or  not)  an  outward  priest- 
hood, ordained  by  Jesus  Christ,  and  an  outward  sacrifice 
offered  there  by  men,  authorized  to  act  as  ambassadors 
of  Christ  and  stewards  of  the  mysteries  of  God.  We 
believe  that  the  threefold  order  of  ministers  is  not  only 
authorized  by  its  apostolical  institution,  but  also  by 
the  written  Word." 

In  1748  he  wrote: 

"I  believe  that  Bishops  are  empowered  to  do  this 
[i.e.,  to  convey  the  ministerial  authority]  and  have  been 
so  from  the  apostolic  age." 

He  thoroughly  approved  the  constitution 

of  the  Church.    His  belief  in  the  priesthood 

or  "sacerdotal  office,"  as  he  called  it,  was  clear 

and  sound.    He  thoroughly  believed  in  the 

episcopate.    He  spoke  reverently  of  his  own 

diocesan  as  "the  High  Priest  of  God,"  and  of 


DOCTRINAL  POSITION. 


39 


an  ancient  Bishop  as  Summus  Sacerdos.  Yet 
here  it  must  be  noted  that  on  this  point  John 
Wesley  was  not  always  consistent.  At  times 
the  confusion  of  titles"  in  the  Apostolic  Church 
confused  him.  And  at  times  he  entertained 
puerile  doubts  as  to  whether  "in  case  of  neces- 
sity," the  Apostolic  Succession  might  not  be 
handed  down  through  presbyters,  on  which  sup- 
position he  made  the  one  fatal  blunder  of  his 
life" 

He  believed  also  in  auricular  confession  as 
a  help  to  sin-burdened  souls." 

"  The  writer  begs  to  refer  to  his  Reasons  for  Being  a 
Churchman,  chapter  IX.,  "Primitive  Episcopacy  and  Its 
Official  Titles." 

22  Wesley  was  not  always  consistent  on  the  subject  of 
Apostolic  Succession.  Again  and  again  he  asserted  it,  and 
yet  more  than  once  he  spoke  of  "the  uninterrupted  succes- 
sion" as  "a  fable."  He  probably  referred  not  to  the  fact 
of  the  transmission  of  Holy  Orders,  but  to  the  authenticity 
of  the  extant  lists  of  Bishops  back  to  the  Apostolic  age. 
(See  Churchman's  Life  of  Wesley,  p.  72,  and  Hammond's 
John  Wesley,  p.  88  et  seq.)  He  regarded  Courayer's  De- 
fence of  Anglican  Orders  as  unanswerable.  When  he  some- 
times spoke  of  himself  as  a  "Scriptural  Bishop,"  he  said : 
"I  spoke  on  Lord  King's  supposition,  that  Bishops  and 
Priests  are  essentially  one  order."  Lord  King's  book,  how- 
ever, was  written  when  the  author  was  only  twenty-two  years 
of  age,  and  a  Presbyterian.  It  was  easily  refuted  by  a 
Churchman,  whereupon  Lord  King  repudiated  it  and  with- 
drew it,  and  conformed  to  the  Church.  (See  Churchman's 
Life  of  Wesley,  Appendix  viil.) 

"Wesley's  Works  (Ed.  1829),  V.  792. 


40 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


He  loved  every  detail  of  Church  worship, 
and  approved  of  every  sacrament,  ordinance, 
rite,  and  ceremony  of  the  Church.  The  Christ- 
ian Year  was  his  delight.  He  loved  its  round 
of  festival  and  fast.  He  used  to  teach  that  a 
man  can  no  more  go  to  heaven  without  fasting 
than  without  praying.  Very  precious  to  him 
was  the  dear  feast  of  All  Saints.  The  com- 
munion of  saints  was  to  him  a  reality.  He 
believed  in  prayers  for  the  faithful  departed, 
and  devoutly  taught  and  used  them.21    He  al- 

24  The  following  are  extracts  from  his  Manual  of  Daily 
Prayer,  first  published  in  1735,  and  deliberately  republished 
by  its  author,  with  the  ne  varietur  of  the  Preface,  in 
1771-3  : 

Sunday  morning. — "Grant  that  they  and  those  that  are 
already  dead  in  the  Lord  may  at  length  enjoy  Thee." 

Monday  morning. — "O  grant  that  we,  with  those  that 
are  already  dead  in  Thy  faith  and  fear,  may  together  par- 
take of  a  joyful  resurrection." 

Monday  evening. — "Bring  them  and  us,  with  those  that 
already  rest  from  their  labours,  into  the  joy  of  our  Lord." 

Tuesday  morning. — "Grant  that  we  all,  together  with 
those  that  now  sleep  in  Thee,  may  awake  to  life  everlasting." 

Tuesday  evening,  also  Wednesday  morning,  Thursday 
evening,  and  Saturday  morning. — "Grant  that  we  and  all 
the  members  of  Thy  Holy  Church  may  find  mercy  in  the 
dreadful  day  of  judgment." 

Thursday  morning. — "That  we,  together  with  all  those 
who  are  gone  before  us  in  Thy  faith  and  fear,  may  find  a 
merciful  acceptance  at  the  last  day." 

Friday  morning. — "Bring  us,  with  all  those  that  have 
pleased  Thee  from  the  beginning  of  the  world,  into  the 
glories  of  Thy  Son's  Kingdom." 

Friday  evening. — "By  Thy  infinite  mercies  vouchsafe  to 


DOCTRINAL  POSITION. 


41 


ways  spoke  of  his  loved  ones  who  had  died  in 
the  Lord  as  being  in  Paradise. 

Next  to  the  oracles  of  God,  he  bowed  his 
will  to  the  authority  of  Holy  Church.  As  he 
believed,  so  he  taught,  through  evil  report  and 
through  good  report,  declaring  in  his  old  age, 
two  years  before  his  death,  "I  have  uniformly 
gone  on  for  fifty  years,  never  varying  from  the 
doctrine  of  the  Church  at  all." 

bring  us,  with  those  that  are  dead  in  Thee,  to  rejoice  to- 
gether before  Thee." 

Saturday  evening. — "O  Lord,  Thou  God  of  spirits  and 
of  all  flesh,  be  mindful  of  Thy  faithful  from  Abel  the  just 
even  unto  this  day  ;  and  for  Thy  Son's  sake  give  to  them 
and  us  in  Thy  due  time  a  happy  resurrection  and  a  glorious 
rest  at  Thy  right  hand  for  evermore." 

It  is  thus  evident  that  John  Wesley,  at  the  mature  age 
of  68,  when  carefully  revising  his  writings,  desired  that 
those  who  used  his  manual  of  daily  prayer  should  make 
daily  intercession  for  the  departed.  These  intercessions 
are  retained  in  the  editions  of  Wesley's  works  published 
after  his  death,  in  1809  and  1818,  but  are  suppressed  in 
Jackson's  edition  of  1829. 


CHAPTER  V. 


ALLEGIANCE  TO  THE  CHURCH. 

€XTRACTS  from  Wesley's  voluminous  writ- 
ings have  often  been  printed  in  tracts,  pam- 
phlets, and  catenae,  showing  what  sort  of 
Churchman  he  was.  I  give  here,  from  among 
many,  some  of  the  more  important  of  his  senti- 
ments and  exhortations,  arranged  in  chronolog- 
ical order  from  1744  to  1791,  proving  thus  that 
he  never  abandoned  the  orthodox  position  so 
long  as  he  lived  :M 

26  These  quotations  are  from  the  Oxford  edition  of 
Wesley's  works,  of  1829,  containing  the  last  corrections 
of  the  author,  made  In  his  old  age.  I  give  the  dates  and 
references,  all  of  which  I  have  carefully  verified.  Nearly 
all  of  them,  with  others,  will  be  found  in  that  excellent 
catena  entitled  "Pastoral  Advice  of  the  Rev.  John  Wesley, 
M.A.,  Edited  by  the  Rev.  James  S.  Pollock,  M.A.,"  to  which 
I  acknowledge  my  Indebtedness,  and  to  which  I  refer  the 
reader. 


ALLEGIANCE  TO  THE  CHURCH.  43 


At  the  first  meeting  of  all  our  preachers  in  confer- 
ence, in  June,  1744,  I  exhorted  them  to  keep  to  the 
Church."  (1744.)" 

"I  dare  not  renounce  communion  with  the  Church 
of  England.  As  a  minister,  I  teach  her  doctrines;  I 
use  her  offices;  I  conform  to  her  rubrics;  I  suffer  re- 
proach for  my  attachment  to  her."  (1746.)" 

"After  dinner,  one  of  our  brethren  asked  if  I  was 
ready  to  go  to  a  meeting.  I  told  him,  /  never  go  to  a 
meeting.  He  seemed  as  much  astonished  as  the  old  Scot 
at  Newcastle,  who  left  us  because  we  were  mere  Church 
of  England  men."  (1756.)" 

"My  brother  and  I  closed  the  conference,  by  a  sol- 
emn declaration  of  our  purpose  never  to  separate  from 
the  Church,  and  all  our  brethren  cheerfully  concurred 
therein."  (1756.)" 

In  1758  he  wrote  a  little  book,  entitled 
"Reasons  against  a  Separation  from  the  Church 
of  England  against  all  Dissenters." 

"Whosoever  separates  from  the  Church,  will  sep- 
arate from  the  Methodists."  (1760.)'° 

He  was  asked :  "Can  you  constantly  charge 
your  people  to  attend  the  worship  of  our  Church 
and  not  Dissenters'  meetings?"  He  replied: 
"I  can ;  this  is  consistent  with  all  I  have  writ- 
ten, and  all  I  have  done  for  many  years." 
(1760.)" 

"We  are  in  truth  so  far  from  being  enemies  to  the 
Church,  that  we  are  rather  bigots  to  it.  I  dare  not,  like 
Mr.  Venn,  leave  the  Parish  Church,  where  I  am,  to  go 
to  an  Independent  meeting.    I  advise  all  over  whom  I 


"Vol.  XIII.,  p.  236. 
"VIII.,  444. 
"II.,  381. 


"XIII.,  305. 
"II.,  260. 
"XIII.,  352-3. 


44 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


have  any  influence  to  keep  steadily  to  the  Church." 
(1769.)" 

While  in  Scotland,  in  1772,  he  writes: 

"I  attended  the  Church  of  England  service  in  the 
morning,  and  that  of  the  Kirk  [the  Presbyterian]  in 
the  afternoon.  Truly  no  man,  having  drunk  old  wine, 
straightway  desireth  new!  How  dull  and  dry  did  the 
latter  appear  to  me,  who  had  been  accustomed  to  the 
former !  "33 

He  had  no  liking  for  Presbyterianism.  The 
Scottish  reformers  he  described  as  "fierce,  sour, 
and  bitter  of  spirit."  When  he  saw  the  massive 
ruins  of  the  Abbey  of  Arbroath  (which  Sir 
Walter  Scott  has  immortalized  in  The  An- 
tiquary), which  the  reformers  had  burned,  he 
exclaimed:  "God  deliver  us  from  reforming 
mobs !" 

"I  began  preaching  without  delay,  and  warned 
them  of  the  madness  which  was  spreading  among  them; 
namely,  leaving  the  Church.  Most  of  them  will,  I  be- 
lieve, take  my  advice;  I  hope  all  that  are  of  our  So- 
ciety."   (  1773.) 31 

"The  Methodists  at  Oxford  were  all  one  body,  and, 
as  it  were,  one  soul ;  zealous  for  the  religion  of  the 
Bible,  and  of  the  primitive  Church,  and  in  consequence, 
of  the  Church  of  England,  as  they  believed  it  to  come 
nearer  the  scriptural  and  primitive  form  than  any  other 
national  Church  upon  earth.  We  do  not,  we  will  not, 
form  any  separate  sect;  but  from  principle  remain, 
what  we  always  have  been,  true  members  of  the  Church 
of  England."    (1777.) 35 


82  III.,  337. 

83  II.,  463. 


"III.,  496. 
"VII.,  429. 


ALLEGIANCE  TO  THE  CHURCH.  46 


"Let  this  be  well  observed.  I  fear  when  the  Meth- 
odists leave  the  Church,  God  will  leave  them."    (  1777. ) 38 

— a  warning  which  he  often  repeated. 

"I  believe  there  is  no  liturgy  in  the  world,  either  in 
ancient  or  modern  language,  which  breathes  more  of  a 
solid,  scriptural,  rational  piety,  than  the  Common 
Prayer  of  the  Church  of  England."  (1784.)" 

"Finding  a  report  had  spread  abroad  [in  Bristol] 
that  I  was  just  going  to  leave  the  Church,  to  satisfy 
those  that  were  grieved  concerning  it,  I  openly  declared 
in  the  evening  that  I  had  now  no  more  thought  of  sep- 
arating from  the  Church  than  I  had  forty  years  ago." 
(1785.)" 

"We  fixed  both  our  morning  and  evening  service, 
all  over  England,  at  such  hours  as  not  to  interfere  with 
the  Church."    (1786.) 30 

"I  told  them  [the  Methodists  at  Deptford,  that 
'den  of  lions'  who,  in  Wesley's  opinion,  'had  neither 
sense  nor  even  good  manners']  if  you  are  resolved,  you 
may  have  your  service  in  church  hours,  but  remember, 
from  that  time  you  will  see  my  face  no  more.  This 
struck  deep,  and  from  that  hour  I  have  heard  no  more 
of  separating  from  the  Church."  (1787.)" 

"Unless  I  see  more  reason  for  it  than  I  ever  yet  saw, 
I  will  not  leave  the  Church  of  England,  as  by  law  estab- 
lished, while  the  breath  of  God  is  in  my  nostrils." 
(1789.)" 

In  the  same  year  he  preached  a  memorahle 
sermon  to  his  'lay-helpers,"  in  which  he  says: 

"Did  we  ever  appoint  you  to  administer  sacraments, 
to  exercise  the  priestly  office?  Such  a  design  never 
entered  into  our  mind,  it  was  the  farthest  from  our 
thoughts.  And  if  any  preacher  had  taken  such  a  step, 
we  should  have  looked  upon  it  as  a  palpable  breach  of 
this  rule,  and  consequently  a  recantation  of  our  con- 
nection.   I  wish  all  of  you  who  are  vulgarly  called 


"VIII.,  319. 
"XIV.,  317. 
"IV.,  320. 


"IV.,  353. 
10  IV.,  375. 
"  XIII.,  238. 


40 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


Methodists  would  seriously  consider  what  has  been 
said;  and  particularly  you  whom  God  hath  commis- 
sioned to  call  sinners  to  repentance.  It  does  by  no 
means  follow  from  hence,  that  ye  are  commissioned  to 
baptize  or  to  administer  the  Lord's  Supper.  Ye  never 
dreamed  of  this  for  ten  or  twenty  years  after  ye 
began  to  preach.  Ye  did  not  then,  like  Korah,  Dathan, 
and  Abiram,  'seek  the  priesthood  also.'  Ye  knew,  'No 
man  taketh  this  honor  unto  himself,  but  he  that  is  called 
of  God,  as  was  Aaron.'  Oh,  contain  yourselves  within 
your  own  bounds!  Be  content  with  preaching  the 
Gospel !  Ye  yourselves  were  at  first  called  in  the  Church 
of  England;  and,  though  ye  have,  and  will  have,  a  thou- 
sand temptations  to  leave  it,  and  set  up  for  yourselves, 
regard  them  not.    Be  Church  of  England  men  still. 

I  dare  not  separate  from  the  Church.  I  believe  it 
would  be  a  sin  so  to  do."    (1789.) 42 


42  VII.,  277-280.  I  add  here  a  copy  of  an  autograph 
letter  of  Wesley,  which  has  just  come  to  light.  The  original 
Is  in  possession  of  Mr.  E.  B.  Braithwaite,  Ealing,  W., 
England : 

"Dublin,  July  7,  1789. 

"My  Dear  Brother. — I  am  not  as  a  reed  shaken  in  the 
wind.    My  yea  is  yea,  and  my  nay  is  nay. 

"I  have  been  firm  to  the  Church  from  my  youth  up ; 
and  so  I  shall  be,  till  my  spirit  returns  to  God. 

"If  Thomas  Hornby  is  otherwise  minded,  I  am  sorry 
for  it. 

"I  am  your  affectionate  brother, 

"J.  Weslby. 

"To  Mr.  Hall,  Junr., 

at  Baisford,  near  Nottingham." 


CHAP  TEE  VI. 


THE    SO-CALLED  ORDINATIONS. 

E  come  now  to  the  saddest,  most  inconsist- 
ent, most  culpable,  most  fatal  blunder  in 
the  life  of  this  zealous  and  godly  man — his  so- 
called  "ordinations." 

As  commonly  reported,  the  story  is  that 
this  priest  consecrated  another  priest,  Dr.  Coke, 
as  bishop,  and  ordained  two  laymen  as  priests, 
for  America,  and  soon  after  some  more  for 
America  and  some  for  Scotland. 

The  history  is  miserable  enough,  God  knows, 
but  not  quite  so  bad  as  commonly  reported. 

As  to  Dr.  Coke's  case,  it  must  be  remem- 
bered that  Coke  was  a  priest  of  the  Church,  in 
the  same  order  as  Wesley  himself,  and  could  as 
well  have  consecrated  Wesley  a  bishop,  as  Wes- 


4S 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


ley  have  made  Coke  a  bishop.  Wesley  never 
intended  to' make  Coke  a  bishop.  He  repu- 
diated the  very  idea  of  such  a  thing,  and  bit- 
terly repented  the  whole  transaction,  to  which, 
in  his  old  age,  he  was  "overpersuaded"  by  the 
crying  necessities  of  America  and  the  impor- 
tunities of  an  ambitious,  vacillating  priest,  Dr. 
Coke,  whose  allegiance  to  the  Church  sat  lightly 
on  him.  It  was  of  him  that  Wesley's  great 
friend,  Alexander  Knox,  wrote:  "That  Dr. 
Coke  urged  Mr.  Wesley  to  this  procedure  I 
know  with  certainty  from  the  Doctor  himself ; 
and  full  acquaintance  with  this  well  meaning 
but  very  inconsiderate  man  makes  me  feel  that 
Mr.  Wesley  could  scarcely  have  had  a  more 
unfortunate  adviser."" 

The  Churchmen  in  America  were  broken 
and  scattered  by  the  Revolution.  They,  in- 
cluding Wesley's  followers,  who  were  still  in 
the  Church,  were  as  sheep  having  no  shepherd. 
To  get  bishops  for  America  seemed  utterly  im- 
possible. Even  Dr.  White,  who  afterwards  be- 
came the  loyal  and  High  Church  Bishop  of 

43  Letter  to  Southey  (Ap.  to  last  ed.  of  Southey's  Life 
of  Wesley).  See  also  Etheridge's  Life  of  Coke,  p.  544 
(Ed.  18C0). 


THE  SO-CALLED  ORDINATIONS.  49 

Pennsylvania,  lost  heart  and  actually  proposed 
the  appointment  of  superintending  presbyters 
who  should  perform  episcopal  functions  includ- 
ing ordination,  as  a  temporary  expedient,  until 
the  "episcopal  succession"  could  be  obtained. 

At  this  juncture,  Dr.  Coke,  an  able,  hard 
working  priest-associate  of  Wesley,  knowing 
Wesley's  weakness  as  to  the  possibility  of 
priests  ordaining  in  cases  of  necessity,  per- 
suaded him  that  here  was  such  a  case. 

The  old  man  at  length  yielded,  and  per- 
formed what  appears  to  have  been  the  sacrilege 
of  a  mock  and  schismatic  ordination.  His 
brother  Charles  so  considered  it.  At  the  same 
time  Wesley  so  guarded  his  action  as  to  prevent 
its  being  an  ordination,  even  had  he  been  a 
Bishop  and  thus  capable  of  conferring  Holy 
Orders.  The  act  was  deficient  in  matter,  form, 
intention,  canonicity,  and  every  attribute  of 
lawfulness  and  validity.  It  was,  in  fact,  an 
inane  and  desperate  fiasco,  and,  as  Charles  Wes- 
ley said,  "realized  the  Nag's  Head  ordina- 
tion."" And  truly  so,  if  meant  to  be  an  or- 
dination. 

"  See  his  memorable  letter  to  Dr.  Chandler.  It  is 
printed  in  full  in  A  Meth.  in  Search  of  the  Ch.,  pp.  201-205. 
For  a  brief  account  of  the  "Nag's  Head  Fable,"  see  Reasons 
for  Being  a  Churchman,  p.  169  (Ed.  1905). 


50 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


But  will  the  logical  reader  observe  the 
dilemma  involved  in  Wesley's  act  regarded  as 
the  ordination  of  CoJce  to  the  episcopate?  A 
Presbyter,  A.,  ordains  another  Presbyter,  B.,  to 
the  episcopate.  Now  a  Bishop  is  either  iden- 
tical with  a  Presbyter,  or  superior.  There  is  no 
other  supposition.  (I.)  identical,  A.  is  capa- 
ble of  conferring  the  episcopate,  but  B.  cannot 
receive  it.  (II.)  //  superior,  B.  is  capable  of 
receiving  the  episcopate,  but  A.  cannot  confer 
it.    Or  more  fully : 

Presbyter  A.  affects  to  ordain  Presbyter  B. 
a  Bishop.  (I.)  If  on  the  supposition  that  a 
Presbyter  is  really  a  Bishop,  then  the  act  is  a 
farce,  for  on  that  supposition  B.  was  already  a 
Bishop,  and  remains  precisely  what  he  was  be- 
fore. (II.)  If  on  the  supposition  that  a  Bishop 
is  of  a  distinct  and  higher  order,  then  the  act  is 
equally  a  farce,  for  A.,  being  on  that  supposi- 
tion only  a  Presbyter  and  not  a  Bishop,  cannot 
impart  what  he  himself  does  not  possess.  In 
either  case,  therefore,  B.  remains  only  what  he 
was  before,  and  both  A.  and  B.  have  committed 
sacrilege. 

Regarded  as  an  "ordination,"  Wesley's  act 
was  illogical,  unintelligible,  fruitless,  sacrilegi- 


THE  SO-CALLED  ORDINATIONS. 


51 


ous.  But  regarded  as  the  appointment  of  a 
"Superintendent"  of  Societies,  a  Legatus  a 
latere,  a  sort  of  Provincial  Superior  of  a  Re- 
ligious Order,  the  act  is  intelligible;  and  is  rep- 
rehensible only  in  so  far  as  it  may  seem  to  have 
imitated — however  slightly — the  outward  form 
of  an  awful  and  sacramental  act. 

The  writer  has  often  appointed  a  beloved 
curate — his  co-equal  Presbyter — to  be  the 
"Superintendent"  of  a  Sunday  School.  Mr. 
Wesley's  appointment  of  Dr.  Coke  amounted,  in 
reality,  to  nothing  more  than  this — only  the 
"School"  was  larger,  and  Dr.  Coke  took  liber- 
ties with  his  appointment,  going,  as  he  himself 
acknowledges  in  his  letter  to  Bishop  White,  fur- 
ther than  Wesley  had  designed ;  yes,  very  much 
further — quam  longissime.  What  were  the 
actual  facts? 

Secretly,  before  daybreak,  in  his  private 
bed-room,  without  consulting  his  wiser  brother, 
who  was  in  the  same  city  (Bristol),  the  old  man 
of  eighty-two  years  laid  his  priestly  hands  on 
the  equally  priestly  head  of  Dr.  Coke,  and  "set 
him  apart  as  a  superintendent."  He  carefully 
avoided  the  word  ordain  and  the  word  Bishop. 


52 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


He  appointed  him  or  set  him  apart  as  superin- 
tendent. Superintendent  of  what  or  of  whom  ? 
"Of  many  people,"  says  he,  "in  the  southern 
provinces  of  North  America,  who  desire  to  con- 
tinue under  my  care,  and  still  adhere  to  the 
doctrine  and  discipline  of  the  Church  of  Eng- 
land." 

In  the  case  of  the  two  laymen  whom  he  is 
said  to  have  ordained  priests  that  same  day,  he 
himself  says  he  had  "appointed  them  to  act  as 
elders,"  whatever  that  may  mean.  This  was, 
in  my  opinion,  a  more  grievous  error  than  the 
"appointment  of  a  Superintendent."  Wesley 
attempts  to  excuse  himself  for  acting  upon 
his  absurd  hypothesis  as  to  the  powers  of 
presbyters,  by  the  plea  of  necessity,  on  ac- 
count of  the  failure  of  all  efforts  to  get  help 
for  America  from  the  English  Bishops,  and  by 
imagining  himself — doubtless  in  all  sincerity 
— "to  be  providentially  called,  at  this  time,  to 
set  apart  some  persons  for  the  work  of  the  min- 
istry in  America."  He  probably  meant  it  to 
be  a  temporary  makeshift,"  and  he  protests 

*»  In  his  letter  to  "Dr.  Coke,  Mr.  Asbury,  and  our 
Brethren  in  North  America,"  he  says  :  "At  present  I  cannot 
see  any  better  method  than  that  I  have  taken." 


THE  SO-CALLED  ORDINATIONS.  53 


again  and  again  that  it  does  not  and  shall  not 
involve  him  in  any  separation  from  the  Church 
of  England. 

The  day  following  he  appointed  three  more 
for  America,  and  soon  after  several  for  Scot- 
land (which  was  still  less  excusable,  and  a 
more  aggravated  offense,  as  there  were  Bishops 
having  canonical  jurisdiction  in  Scotland). 
But  he  would  never  allow  these  appointees  to 
act  as  ministers,  or  to  wear  the  surplice,  or  to  be 
addressed  as  reverend,  when  they  set  foot  south 
of  the  Tweed,  i.e.,  within  the  jurisdiction  of 
the  Church  of  England,  to  which  he  was  even 
now,  inconsistently,  loyal.  Indeed,  in  his  des- 
peration, he  fell  back  on  a  sort  of  Erastianism, 
against  which  he  had  uniformly  protested,  and 
declared:  "Whatever  is  done  in  America  or 
Scotland  is  no  separation  from  the  Church  of 
England."  (  !)" 

When  his  wiser  brother,  Charles,  from 

"The  charge  that  Wesley  "ordained  any  for  work  in 
England  proper,  has  never  been  proved,  and  is  undoubtedly 
false.  See  The  Churchman's  Life  of  Wesley,  by  R.  Denny 
Urlin,  pp.  183-4  ;  also  Overton's  John  Wesley,  p.  206.  The 
total  number  of  "ordinees,"  according  to  Mr.  Urlin,  was 
"about  nine."  None  of  them  on  returning  to  England  were 
accorded  any  rank  or  prerogative  above  the  ordinary  "lay 
preachers,"  and  none  of  them  took  part  in  "ordinations." 


54 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


whom  he  had  concealed  his  strange  act,  heard  of 
all  this,  it  broke  his  heart  and  aroused  his  right- 
eous indignation.   Most  pathetic  are  his  letters, 
most  keen  is  his  sarcasm. 
His  satire  is  well  known : 

"How  easy  now  are  bishops  made, 
By  man's  or  woman's  whim; 
Wesley  his  hands  on  Coke  hath  laid, 
But  who  laid  hands  on  him?" 

And  that  other  line: 
"  'Twas  age  that  made  the  breach,  not  he." 

Our  rash  old  zealot's  heart  is  also  touched. 
He  at  first  tries  to  defend  his  amazing  conduct 
and  to  apologize  for  it;  but  he  certainly  regrets 
it.  He  writes  to  his  brother :  "If  you  had  kept 
close  to  me,  I  might  have  done  better."  He 
admits  that  he  was  "overpersuaded." 

Dr.  Coke  himself  knows  that  his  appoint- 
ment is  no  ordination.  On  four  different  occa- 
sions, after  he  had  gone  into  schism,  he  offers 
to  conform  again  to  the  Church,  if  only  he  can 
be  ordained  a  real  Bishop." 

47  In  this  connection  one  should  read  A  Meth.  in  Search 
of  the  Ch.,  Chap.  XI.,  and  especially  pp.  144-5.  He  applied 
to  Bp.  White,  Bp.  Seabury,  Lord  Liverpool,  and  Mr.  Wilber- 
force.  Hammond's  John  Wesley  should  be  read  with  care, 
especially  pp.  92-6 ;  also  p.  49. 

I  am  indebted  to  the  Rev.  R.  B.  Waterman  for  the 
following  note : 

"No  one  condemns  the  claims  of  Methodist  'bishops' 


THE  SO-CALLED  ORDINATIONS.  55 


Meanwhile,  Dr.  Coke  goes  to  America, 
where,  in  conjunction  with  a  Priest  of  the 

so  unsparingly  as  the  Methodist  Dr.  Tyerman  in  his  Life 
and  Times  of  Rev.  Jno.  Wesley;  and  I  would  commend  that 
work  to  the  clergy  for  its  fairness  and  fulness  In  giving 
extracts  from  Wesley's  writings.  Tyerman  attributes  the 
Methodist  episcopate  to  the  'ambition'  of  Dr.  Coke.  He 
gives  a  very  full  account  of  Wesley's  ordination  of  Coke, 
and  his  subsequent  letter  to  Asbury.  Here  are  one  or  two 
extracts  from  Tyerman's  work,  pp.  433-438  : 

"  'We  have  no  fault  to  find  with  the  American  Method- 
ists being  called  the  Methodist  Episcopal  Church,  .  .  . 
but  it  was  a  name  which  Wesley  never  used  ;  and  to  cen- 
sure him  for  ordaining  bishops  is  to  censure  him  for  what 
he  never  did.  He  ordained  a  superintendent ;  but  he  never 
thought  to  call  him  a  Bishop.' 

"Again  : 

"  'With  the  highest  respect  for  Dr.  Coke,  and  for  his 
general  excellencies,  it  is  no  detraction  to  assert  that  he 
was  dangerously  ambitious,  and  that  the  height  of  his  am- 
bition was  a  desire  to  be  a  Bishop.  Some  years  after  this, 
Coke,  unknown  to  Wesley  and  Asbury,  addressed  a  confi- 
dential letter  to  Dr.  White,  Bishop  of  the  Protestant  Episco- 
pal Church  in  Pennsylvania,  which,  if  it  meant  anything, 
meant  that  Coke  would  like  the  Methodists  of  America  to  be 
be  reunited  to  the  English  Church,  on  condition  that  he 
himself  was  ordained  to  be  their  Bishop.  In  1794  he  se- 
cretly summoned  a  meeting  at  Lichfield  of  the  most  In- 
fluential of  the  English  preachers,  and  passed  a  resolution 
that  the  Conference  should  appoint  an  order  of  bishops  to 
ordain  deacons  and  elders,  he  himself,  of  course,  expecting 
to  be  a  member  of  the  prelatical  brotherhood.  And,  again, 
It  Is  a  well-known  fact  that  within  twelve  months  of  his 
lamented  death,  he  wrote  to  the  Earl  of  Liverpool,  stating 
that  he  was  willing  to  return  most  fully  into  the  bosom  of 
the  Established  Church,  on  condition  that  his  royal  High- 
ness, the  Prince  Regent,  and  the  government,  would  appoint 
him  their  bishop  In  India.' 

"Tyerman  concludes :  These  are  unpleasant  facts, 
which  we  would  rather  have  consigned  to  oblivion,  had 


56 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


Church,  and  a  Lutheran  preacher,  he  lays  his 
hands  three  times  on  the  head  of  a  pious,  un- 
scholarly  layman,  Mr.  Asbury,  appointing  him 
successively  deacon,  elder,  superintendent. 
Then  he  and  Asbury  call  themselves  "bishops," 
and  break  with  the  Church ;  and  Asbury  is  said 
to  have  destroyed  a  large  invoice  of  Prayer 
Books  which  Wesley  had  sent  to  America." 

Our  zealot  has  started  an  avalanche  which 
he  cannot  control.  In  vain  he  writes  to  Mr. 
Asbury,  including  Dr.  Coke  also  in  his  scathing 
rebuke : 

"How  can  you,  how  dare  you,  suffer  yourself  to  be 
called  a  bishop?  I  shudder,  I  start  at  the  very  thought! 
Men  may  call  me  a  knave,  a  fool,  a  rascal,  a  scoundrel, 
and  I  am  content;  but  they  shall  never  by  my  consent 
call  me  a  bishop.  For  my  sake,  for  God's  sake,  for 
Christ's  sake,  put  a  full  stop  to  this.  Let  Presbyterians 
do  what  they  please,  but  let  the  Methodists  know  their 
calling  better."" 


they  not  been  necessary  to  vindicate  Wesley  from  the  huge 
inconsistency  of  ordaining  a  co-equal  presbyter  to  be  a 
Bishop.  Wesley  meant  the  ceremony  to  be  a  mere  formality 
likely  to  recommend  his  delegate  to  the  favor  of  the  Meth- 
odists in  America:  Coke  in  his  ambition  wished,  and  in- 
tended it  to  be  considered  as,  an  ordination  to  a  bishopric'  " 

48  See  A  Meth.  in  Search  of  the  Ch.,  p.  104  et  seq.  A 
few  copies  escaped,  and  one  is  preserved  in  the  library  of 
the  General  Theological  SemiDary,  in  New  York. 

"  Wesley's  Notes,  VII.,  187.  The  supposition  that 
Wesley  had  bribed  a  Greek  Bishop,  Erasmus  of  Crete,  to 
consecrate  him  secretly,  is  absurd.  Greek  Bishops  cannot 
consecrate  without  two  co-consecrators.  Wesley  denied  the 
insinuation. 


THE  SO-CALLED  ORDINATIONS. 


57 


Hampson,  Wesley's  earliest  biographer, 
writes:  "Sometime  before  his  death  Mr.  Wes- 
ley repented  of  the  steps  he  had  taken"  (in  the 
so-called  ordinations) ;  and  the  Rev.  James 
Creighton,  a  priest  in  Anglican  Orders,  one  of 
Wesley's  most  trusted  clergymen,  employed  by 
him  to  celebrate  the  sacraments  in  London,  and 
who  was  induced  to  unite  with  him  in  the  "or- 
dinations," has  testified  that  Wesley  repented 
with  tears  that  he  had  ordained  any  of  his  lay- 
preachers,  and  that  he  expressed  his  sorrow  for 
it  at  the  conference  of  1789,  and  occasionally 
afterwards  until  his  death  in  1791.  In  the  last 
six  weeks  of  his  life  Wesley  exclaimed:  "The 
preachers  are  now  too  powerful  for  me !" 

We  cannot  forbid  him  to  tread  the  via 
pamitentice. 

Oh,  had  he  been  content  to  wait  but  three 
short  months,  his  followers  in  America  would 
then  have  had,  in  the  person  of  Samuel  Sea- 
bury,  a  true  successor  of  the  Apostles,  a  Bishop 
after  Wesley's  own  heart,  and  one,  too,  who 
would  gladly  (as  he  told  Charles  Wesley)  have 
ordained  all  the  lay-preachers  in  America  who 
were  fit  to  receive  Holy  Orders. 

Thus  the  American  Methodists  drifted  away 


58 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


from  the  Church,  to  our  great  loss — as  we  freely 
admit — and  to  their  own  great  loss,  as  many  of 
my  Methodist  friends  have  acknowledged  to 
me. 

In  England  the  Methodists  remained  true 
to  the  Catholic  Church  until  after  Wesley's 
death.  Then  the  most  of  them,  step  by  step, 
trampled  his  life-long  teachings  under  their 
feet,  and,  ceasing  to  be  Churchmen,  ceased  to  be 
true  Wesleyans. 

I  cannot  go  into  the  history  of  the  unfor- 
tunate schism.  Suffice  it  to  say,  it  was  the 
greatest  blow  the  Holy  Church  throughout  all 
the  world  has  received  during  the  last  three 
hundred  years,  and  was  in  defiance  of  the  con- 
victions, the  hopes,  the  plans,  the  warnings,  and 
the  commands  of  the  founder  of  Methodism.6' 

50  The  separation  of  the  English  Methodists  from  the 
Church  was  gradual,  being  marked  by  three  stages : 

I.  Soon  after  Wesley's  death  it  was  proposed,  in  the 
Conference  of  1702,  that  the  lay-preachers  should  be  allowed 
to  administer  the  sacraments.  It  was  decided  to  leave  the 
decision  to  God.  by  casting  lots.  The  lot  was  against  the 
proposed  sacrilege.  At  a  subsequent  Conference,  1795, 
a  vote  was  taken,  and  by  a  bare  majority  it  was  decided  to 
allow  the  lay-preachers  to  administer  the  Sacraments.  This 
they  proceeded  to  do  (though  a  majority  of  Methodist 
families,  for  a  generation  and  more,  continued  to  resort  to 
the  Church  for  sacramental  ministrations).  No  laying-on- 
of-hands,  no  form  of  ordination  was  used.  This  custom 
continued  for  forty-one  years. 


THE  SO-CALLED  ORDINATIONS.  59 


"No  voice  from  Heaven  hath  clearly  said, 
'Let  us  depart';  then  fear  to  roam."  (Keble.) 

H.  In  1836,  the  Conference  decreed  that  thereafter 
all  their  ministers  should  be  "ordained"  by  the  laying  on  of 
hands.  Thereupon  three  lay-preachers  who  had  never  re- 
ceived, directly  or  indirectly,  any  form  of  ordination  what- 
ever, viz.,  Messrs.  Bunting,  Reece,  and  Newton,  laid  their 
hands  on  the  new  candidates.  This  is  the  origin  of  the 
Methodist  ministry  in  England.  It  has  no  connection  with 
Wesley.  He  would  have  scorned  it.  It  lies  under  his 
anathema. 

III.  I  quote  the  words  of  an  accurate  writer  in  the 
Church  Times: 

"Down  to  the  Nottingham  Conference  of  1891,  the 
Wesleyans  had  never  'assumed  the  name  of  a  Church' ; 
up  to  that  date,  all  neophytes  had  been  admitted  by  ticket 
into  the  'Wesleyan  Methodist  Society.'  But  it  was  then 
decreed  that  when  the  existing  stock  of  tickets  had  been  used 
up  (for  the  Conference  had  a  frugal  mind),  the  new  ones 
should  bear  the  stamp  of  'Wesleyan  Methodist  Church,'  and 
measures  were  taken  to  advertise  the  public  of  the  trans- 
formation— in  hundreds  of  instances,  for  example,  the  words, 
'Wesleyan  Chapel'  were  painted  out,  and  the  words  'Wes- 
leyan Church'  painted  in,  on  the  notice  boards  of  the  Meth- 
odist sanctuaries."  They  seem  to  have  forgotten  Wesley's 
own  words,  "Warn  them  [the  Methodists]  against  calling 
our  Society  'a  Church,'  or  'the  Church.'"  (Wesley's  Works, 
Vol.  vi.,  358,  Ed.  of  1810.) 

As  late  as  1784,  when  Wesley  sent  Coke  to  America,  he 
still  forbade  his  American  followers  to  hold  services  at 
Church  hours  in  any  place  where  there  was  a  church.  (See 
Churchman's  Life  of  Wesley,  p.  171.) 


CHAPTER  VII. 


THE  PEACEFUL  END  IN  THE  COMMUNION  OF 
THE  CATHOLIC  CHUECH. 

OUR  aged  priest,  after  his  sad  and  repented 
blunder,  lived  on  some  five  years;  still 
prayed,  still  preached,  still  loved.  And  his  love 
for  the  dear  old  Church  grew  stronger  and 
stronger  as  the  light  of  the  New  Jerusalem 
streamed  in  upon  his  ripening  soul.  The  only 
cloud  on  his  horizon  was  the  dread  lest,  after  his 
decease,  some  of  his  followers — he  feared  per- 
haps "a  third"  of  them — should  leave  the 
Church.  Dear,  credulous  heart!  He  little 
knew ;  he  little  knew !  But  he  left  it  on  record 
that  if  they  left  the  Church,  they  left  him,  and 
God  would  leave  them.  When  his  friend,  Alex- 
ander Knox,  asked  him  how  he  would  wish  his 


THE  PEACEFUL  END. 


Gl 


friends  to  act  in  case  the  Methodists  should 
withdraw  from  the  Church,  his  answer  was: 

"I  WOULD  HAVE  THEM  ADHERE  TO  THE  CHURCH 

and  leave  the  Methodists."  Fifteen  months 
before  his  death,  he  said : 

"I  never  had  any  design  of  separating  from 

the  Church.   I  have  no  such  design  now  

I  declare  once  more  that  I  live  and  die  a  mem- 
ber of  the  Church  of  England;  and  that  none 

WHO  REGARD  MY  JUDGMENT  OR  ADVICE  WILL 

ever  separate  from  it." — (December  11, 
1789).51 

The  calm  and  the  peace  of  Paradise  were 
now  upon  him.  He  kneels  on  Jordan's  brink 
awaiting  the  Master's  call.  His  last  words  are, 
"Bless  the  Church  and  King,  and  grant  us  truth 
and  peace,  through  Jesus  Christ  our  Lord." — 
"Farewell." 

The  active  brain,  the  tireless  body,  the  lov- 
ing heart  of  the  Anglican  zealot  are  at  rest  for- 
evermore. 

He  was  taken  away  from  the  evil  to  come. 
He  did  not  live  to  see  his  lay-preachers  usurp- 
ing the  priesthood,  and  mutilating  their  found- 


"Vol.  XIII.,  241. 


62 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


er's  tomb."  He  did  not  live  to  see  inexcusable 
apostacy  sweeping  not  "the  third  part,"  but 
nearly  the  whole,  of  his  followers  from  the 
Catholic  Church  he  loved,  into  the  schism  he 
abhorred.  He  did  not  live  to  see  his  one  mis- 
taken and  repented  act  of  outrage  upon  the  poor 
American  Church,  bereaving  her  of  millions  of 
her  children — nourished  at  her  breast,  but  now 
lifting  up  their  heel  against  their  Holy  Mother. 
He  did  not  live  to  see  his  own  works  garbled," 
expurgated,  suppressed,  mistranslated,  misap- 
plied, and  himself,  Josiah  that  he  was,  unjustly 
placed  in  the  gallery  of  popular  history  as  a  son 
of  Nebat  who  made  Israel  to  sin.  He  did  not 
live  to  see  his  lifelong  pleading  for  unity  with- 
in the  Kingdom  of  God,  answered  by  the  great 
defection  from  that  Kingdom,  and  that  defec- 
tion itself  rent  by  centrifugal  disintegration 

52  Strictly  speaking,  I  refer  here  to  the  memorial  tab- 
let which  was  placed  in  the  City  Road  chapel,  with  the 
inscription  :  "The  Patron  and  Friend  of  the  Lay  Preachers." 
After  the  lay-preachers  had  affected  to  usurp  the  priesthood, 
the  original  tablet  was  replaced  with  another,  bearing  the 
Inscription  :  "The  Chief  Promoter  and  Patron  of  the  Plan 
of  Itinerant  Preaching." 

63  For  nearly  a  century  past  the  Methodists  have  pub- 
lished only  garbled  or  expurgated  editions  of  Wesley's 
works.  To  know  what  Wesley  taught,  one  must  resort  to 
the  old  editions.  Even  Jackson's  Ed.  of  1829  omits  some 
of  his  valuable  teaching. 


THE  PEACEFUL  END.  63 

into  a  score  and  a  half  of  sects,  a  swarm  of 
meteors  dancing,  in  their  oblique,  eccentric,  in- 
dividual orbits,  through  the  kosmos  of  God !" 

Sleep,  noble  zealot  of  the  Catholic  Cburch ! 
Dream,  if  thou  canst,  that  thy  children  are  still 
in  the  dear  old  Homestead.  Or,  if  angel-mes- 
sage have  made  known  to  thee  the  catastrophe, 
yet  of  this  be  assured :  thy  labor  was  not  all  in 
vain.  Thou  didst  rouse  from  her  slumber  the 
Bride  of  Christ  in  the  realm  of  England.  Her 
waking  was  slow.  But  oh,  that  thou  couldst  see 
her  now! — awake  beyond  thine  utmost  vision, 
alive  above  thy  fondest  hope ! 

And  those  wandering  children,  mayhap, 
God,  in  His  own  time  and  way,  will  "fetch 
them  home,"  that  the  followers  of  John  Wesley, 
restored  to  the  Church  of  John  Wesley,  may  be 
Wesleyans  once  more. 


"There  are  now  from  25  to  30  Methodist  denomina- 
tions, of  which  17  are  in  the  U.  S.  A. 


64 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


OREMUS. 

OGOD,  the  Father  of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  our 
only  Saviour,  the  Prince  of  Peace;  Give  us  grace 
seriously  to  lay  to  heart  the  great  dangers  we  are  in 
by  our  unhappy  divisions.  Take  away  all  hatred  and 
prejudice,  and  whatever  else  may  hinder  us  from  godly 
union  and  concord:  that  as  there  is  but  one  Body  and 
one  Spirit,  and  one  hope  of  our  calling,  one  Lord,  one 
Faith,  one  Baptism,  one  God  and  Father  of  us  all,  so 
we  may  be  all  of  one  heart  and  of  one  soul,  united  in 
one  holy  bond  of  truth  and  peace,  of  faith  and  charity, 
and  may  with  one  mind  and  one  mouth  glorify  Thee: 
through  Jesus  Christ  our  Lord.  Amen. 


INDEX. 


Aaron,  46. 
Absolution,  14. 
Adoration,  Eucharistic,  36, 
37. 

All  Saints,  40. 
Altar,  19,  36,  38. 
America,  20,  23,  47,  48,  52, 

53,  56. 
Anne,  Queen,  1,  3. 
Anabaptists,  12. 
Analogy,  Butler's,  6. 
Andrew,    St.,  Brotherhood 

of.  28. 

Anglo-Catholic,  x,  si,  16, 

22,  30. 
Anselm,  St.,  13. 
Apostolic  Succession,  38, 

39,  and  n. 
Arbroath,  Abbey  of,  44. 
Asbury,  52  n.,  55  n.,  56. 
Atheism,  5. 


Bancroft,  Bp.,  13. 

Baptism,  32,  33,  35. 

Bede,  13. 

Bell-Coxe,  31. 

Bishop,  etc.,  2,  3,  4,  15,  31, 

38,  39,  48,  52,  53,  57. 
Blackstone,  7. 
Braithwaitb,  46. 
Brechin,  Bp.  of,  31. 
Bristol,  45,  51. 
Bunting,  59  n. 


I!i:i:khley,  Bp.,  15. 
Butler,  Bp.,  6,  8,  15, 


Carltle,  15. 
Caroline  Divines,  2,  6. 
Cathedral,  9,  10,  29. 
Catholicity,  2,  29. 
Chandler,  Dr.,  49  n. 
Charles  II.,  2. 
Christian  Year,  11,  40. 
Church,  the  American,  48, 
62  ; 

Anglican,  English,  etc.,  xi, 
xiii,  1,  2,  3,  4,  13,  14, 
38,  41.  43,  44,  45,  46, 
55,  61,  G2,  63. 
"Church  Times,"  34n.,  50n. 
Churchman,  xli,  xiii,  19,  24, 

42,  48,  58. 
CnuRciiMANSHir,  xi,  32; 

Test  of,  35. 
City  Road  Chapel.  62  n. 
Coke.  Dr.,  35  n.,  47,  48.  49, 

50,  51,  54.  55  n.,  56. 
Communion  (see  Eucharist). 

Early,  14. 
Conference,  28,  58  n.  ; 
Of  me,  59  n.  ; 
Nottingham,  1891,  59  n. 
Confession,   Auricular,  21, 
29. 

Confirmation,  4,  33,  34  n., 

35  and  n. 
Confucius,  7. 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


Connection,  Methodist,  xi, 
45. 

Continuity,  2.  ■ 
Convocation,  3,  4. 
Cobnwallis,  Archbp.,  11. 
Courayer,  39  n. 
Credence,  36. 
Creed,  8,  32. 


Cose,  Bp.,  6. 

D. 

Deism,  5,  6. 
Deptford,  45. 
Dilemma,  50. 
Dissent,  12,  29,  43. 
Dolling,  31. 
Dominic,  St.,  2. 

E. 

Eighteenth  Century,  1,  3, 

10,  15. 
Ely,  10. 
Enraght,  31. 
Erasmus,  Greek  Bp.,  56  n. 
Erastian,  4,  15,  10,  26,  53. 
Eucharist,  The  Holy,  6,  19, 
21,  35  to  38  ; 
A  Sacrifice,  35  ; 
Only  a  Priest  can  Conse- 
crate the,  36  ; 
Daily,  the  ideal,  36  ; 
Presence  of  Christ  in  the, 
36,  37. 
Exeter,  29. 

F. 

Faithful  Departed,  Pray- 
ers for  the,  40  and  n. 
Fasts  and  Feasts,  14,  40. 
Fletcher  of  Madeley,  33. 
Francis,  St.,  2. 
Friars,  1,  27. 

G. 

Georges,  Church  under  the, 
4  et  seq. 

Georgia,  20  to  23. 

Goldsmith,  13. 

Greek  Bishop  (see  Eras- 
mus). 


ITampson,  57. 
Heresy',  5,  9  ; 

Calvinistic,  3  ; 

Moravian,  23, 


"High  Priest  of  God,"  38 
Horshley,  Bp.,  6. 

Incense,  8,  9. 
Independents,  12,  43. 
Infidelity,  5. 

J. 

James  II.,  3. 

Jesus,  Reverence  at  Name 

of,  8. 
Johnson,  Dr.,  27. 
Josiah,  xli,  62. 

K. 

Keble,  31,  57. 
King,  Lord,  39  n. 
Kirk,  the,  44. 
Korah,  46. 
Knox,  Alex.,  48,  60. 

L. 

Laud,  Archbp.,  13. 
Law,  Rev.  Wm.,  18,  35  n. 
Lay  Helpers,  27  ; 

Sermon  to,  45. 
Lay   Preachers,  27,  35  n., 

57,  61,  62. 
Leckey,  14  n. 
Legatus  a  latere,  51. 
Lent,  19. 
Lights,  8. 

Lincoln,  Bp.  of,  31 ; 

College,  17. 
Litany,  21. 
Littledale,  Dr.,  31. 
Lowth,  Bp.,  15,  27. 
M. 

Macedonian  Cry,  20 
Mackonochib,  31. 
Matins,  21. 

Methodist,  xi,  xii,  xiii  l 
43,  45,  46,  56,  61,  62  n.  • 

American,  58  ; 

English,  58  ; 

Separation  of,  58  n  ■ 

Denominations,  63  n.' ; 

"M.  E.  Church,"  55  n.  ; 

Origin  of  Name,  19  ; 

Oxford,  19,  23,  44. 

Services    not    at  Church 
hours,  29,  45,  59  n. 
Mixed  Chalice,  36. 
Mobs,  Reforming,  44. 
Mohammed,  6. 
Moravian,  23,  24,  25,  30 
Music,  10,  29. 


N. 

Nag's  Head,  49. 
Neal,  Dr.,  31. 
Necessity,  Cases  of,  39. 
Newton,  59  n. 
NONJUBOB8,  13,  18. 

O. 

Orders,  Holy,  38,  49. 
Oxford,  17,  18,  19,  20,  23; 

Methodists,  19,  23,  44; 

Movement,  xi,  19. 
P. 

Pakadise,  41,  61. 
Patristic  Learning,  13. 
Peter,  St.,  ix. 
Pollock,  Rev.  J.  S.,  42  n. 
Pews,  10. 

PORTEUS,  Bp.,  11. 

Potter,  Bp.,  15,  17. 
Prayer  Book,  8,  13,  21,  30, 
45. 

Presbyterian,  12,  44,  56. 
Priest,  etc.,  3,  30  n.,  38,  46, 
61. 

Protestant,  etc.,  3,  12,  16, 

21,  26,  29. 
Provincial  Superior,  51. 
Psalms,  10,  11 ; 

Versions  of,  11  n. 
Pusey,  Dr.,  18,  31. 

R. 

Real  Presence,  The,  36,  37. 
Rebellion,  The  Puritan,  2. 
Reece,  59  n. 
Reformation,  The,  2. 
Regeneration,  Baptismal, 

32,  33. 
Figurative,  33. 
Restoration,  The,  2. 
Revolution,  The  American, 

48. 

Ritual,  Catholic,  7,  8,  9. 
Roman  Catholics,  12. 


Sacerdotal  Office,  38. 
Sacraments,  6,  13,  32  to  40. 
Sancroft,  Archbp.,  13. 
Savannah,  20. 
Scotland,  3,  44,  47,  53. 
Scott,  43 ; 

Sir  Walter,  44. 
Seabury,  Bp.,  57. 


07 


Schism,  29,  54,  58,  62. 
Separation,  xi,  xiii,  43,  45, 
61  ; 

From  Ch.,  a  sin,  46. 
Societies,  Religious,  14  and 

Socinians,  12. 
Superintendent,     51,  52, 
55  n. 

Summus  Sacerdos,  39. 
Surplice,  53. 

T. 

Theodore,  St.,  1. 
Tobacco,  10. 
Tooth,  31. 
Tyerman,  ix,  55  n. 
Typhoid,  2. 
Unitarianism,  5. 
Unity,  62  ; 

Prayer  for,  64. 
University,  13 ; 

Northwestern,  xi. 

V. 

Vestments,  8. 

W. 

Waterland,  Bp.,  6,  15. 
Waterman,  Rev.  R.  B.,  54  n. 
Wesley,  Rev.   Charles,  18, 

24,  31,  49,  53,  54,  57. 
Wesleys,  The,  10,  12,  31. 
Wesley,  Rev.  John, 

Aim  to  Supplement,  x  ; 

Not  always  consistent,  x; 

An  Anglo-Catholic  Zealot, 
16; 

High  Churchman,  16,  18, 
20  n.  ; 

His  Father,  16,  18; 

His  Mother,  16,  20; 

Early  Education,  16  ; 

At  Oxford,  17  ; 

Ordered  Deacon,  17  ; 

Priest,  17,  18; 

A  Catholic,  18; 

His  Christianity,  19,  20  ; 

Goes  to  Georgia,  20  ; 

Disappointment,  22; 

Work  not  a  failure,  22; 

Moravian  influence,  22 
et  scg. ; 

Breaks  from  Moravian  In- 
fluence, 24  ; 


68 


JOHN  WESLEY. 


Life-work,  26  seg.  ; 
Preaching,  26  to  28  ; 
Founds  Societies,  27,  28  ; 
Loves  Music,  29 ; 
Novel  Methods,  30  ; 
Disregard       of  Parish 

Bounds,  30  and  n.  ; 
Persecution,  31 ; 
No  Formal  Censure,  31  ; 
Doctrinal     Position,  32 
et  seq.  : 

On  Baptism,  32,  33  ; 

Confirmation,  33,  34  ; 

Holv  Eucharist,  35  to 
38  ; 

Never  changed,  37,  38, 
41  ; 

Holy  Orders,  38,  39  ; 
Confession,  39  ; 
Love   of  Ch.  Customs, 
40; 


Prayers  for  the  Dead, 
40  and  n.  ; 
His  Allegiance  to  the  Ch., 

Shown  by  his  writings, 

42  et  seq. ; 
Appointment  of  Coke,  and 

"ordinations,"  47  to  58  ; 
Repents,  57  ; 

Increasing   Love  for  the 
Ch.,  60  ; 

Only  Cloud,  60  ; 

Last  Words,  61  ; 

Works  garbled,  62  and  n. 
White,  Bp.,  48,  49,  51,  55  n. 
Whitefield,  22. 
William  of  Orange,  3. 
Wilson,  Bp.,  15. 
Wolsey,  13. 

Z. 

ZlNZENDORF,  24. 


PUBLISHER'S  NOTICE 


BOOKS  BY  THE  REV.  ARTHUR  W.  LITTLE,  D.D..L.H.D 


Reasons  for  Being  a  Churchman 

ADDRESSED  TO  ENGLISH  SPEAKING 
CHRISTIANS  OF  EVERY  NAME 

It  is  worth  one's  while  to  read  the  following  from  a  vast 
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